Unpersuaded by the Music of the Bell
This Washington Post Magazine story's been noted on The Rest is Noise and Talking Points Memo but I'll pass along the link anyway: The author, Gene Weingarten, convinced violinist Joshua Bell to play in a downtown Washington, D.C. Metro station during the morning rush hour to see what would happen.
I guess I won't give away the results, which Weingarten does a good job of teasing apart, but I'll note that he compares the video of the event (which should be available on the article's site if you can get it to load) to Koyaanisqatsi, by which I mean they're pretty disheartening. The movie comparison is apt, I think. Weingarten and Bell's experiment doesn't say a whole lot about classical music itself. It says a fair amount about framing experiences -- the few people who were struck by the music didn't imagine Bell, one of the most acclaimed and accomplished virtuosos out there right now, to be anything more unique than a gifted professional, and how many of us would without a ticket in hand and a concert hall around us? But what it really gets at is our pace and style of life; it's kind of sick that almost nobody stops to listen to Joshua Bell, but it's very sick that almost nobody would stop for anything. I don't think the test would play out the same way in every time and place in the country -- though it'd probably be similar in more cases than I want to think -- but the pervasive idea that we constantly need to be going somewhere or doing something according to these very precisely tuned schedules, to the point where unplanned experiences along the way need to be walked past and ignored, seems like it must be helping make us feel as harried and -- relative to our material comforts -- miserable as we apparently are.
I guess I won't give away the results, which Weingarten does a good job of teasing apart, but I'll note that he compares the video of the event (which should be available on the article's site if you can get it to load) to Koyaanisqatsi, by which I mean they're pretty disheartening. The movie comparison is apt, I think. Weingarten and Bell's experiment doesn't say a whole lot about classical music itself. It says a fair amount about framing experiences -- the few people who were struck by the music didn't imagine Bell, one of the most acclaimed and accomplished virtuosos out there right now, to be anything more unique than a gifted professional, and how many of us would without a ticket in hand and a concert hall around us? But what it really gets at is our pace and style of life; it's kind of sick that almost nobody stops to listen to Joshua Bell, but it's very sick that almost nobody would stop for anything. I don't think the test would play out the same way in every time and place in the country -- though it'd probably be similar in more cases than I want to think -- but the pervasive idea that we constantly need to be going somewhere or doing something according to these very precisely tuned schedules, to the point where unplanned experiences along the way need to be walked past and ignored, seems like it must be helping make us feel as harried and -- relative to our material comforts -- miserable as we apparently are.
2 Comments:
There is a great response to the Joshua Bell article by a NYC subway musician in her blog: www.SawLady.com/blog
She interprets the situation differently from the Washington Post reporters... I thought you might find it interesting.
I think it'd be more interesting to put him somewhere where people would be more willing to stop - a main street or shopping thoroughfare. I've seen plenty of crowds for around all sorts of garbage in the kind of context, and to compare that kind of crowd to the kind of crowd drawn by Bell would be more interesting. I hate iPods, but also, a commute is a commute, and most of us don't ever want to spend any more time doing that than we have to.
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