hank alrich
April 8th 07, 06:57 AM
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR20070
40401721_pf.html> (Nice videos, too.)
Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C.
rush hour? Let's find out.
By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007;
HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED
HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was
nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a
Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a
violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few
dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian
traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush
hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical
pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to
work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant
Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly
mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles:
policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist,
facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in
any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the
cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of
guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden
demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be
polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's
really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the
moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in
an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing
against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of
the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world,
playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most
valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The
Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities
-- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal
setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might
have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that
have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music
befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.
The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of
utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the
outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and
resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the
human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and
laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring,
flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal,
sumptuous.
So, what do you think happened?
HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was
asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically,
if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a
traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?
"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken
for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's
really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in
Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be
35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100
will stop and spend some time listening."
So, a crowd would gather?
"Oh, yes."
And how much will he make?
"About $150."
Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really
happened.
"How'd I do?"
We'll tell you in a minute.
"Well, who was the musician?"
Joshua Bell.
"NO!!!"
A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an
internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the
Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony
Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at
the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a
standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they
stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that
Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for
the attention of busy people on their way to work.
Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee
at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to
perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to
examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged
to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The
curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.
"Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm
thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ."
He smiled.
". . . on Kreisler's violin."
It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick --
and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced
showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august.
He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also
appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in
feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie
"The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta
Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best
Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a
god."
When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform
at rush hour, he said:
"Uh, a stunt?"
Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?
Bell drained his cup.
"Sounds like fun," he said.
Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like
dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he
performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in
white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro,
in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling.
That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his
technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost
dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.
He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In
Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the
very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea
of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate
of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the
performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell.
Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview
magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings
why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously,
with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw."
For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for
participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether,
in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His
condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an
overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose
work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he
said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.
It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that
will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.
It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in
question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a
congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that
manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.
One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first
music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents,
both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after
they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser
drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in
and out to vary the pitch.
TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell
took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.
Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using
another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted
in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden
period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest
spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to
perfection.
"Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he
just . . . knew."
Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist
shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck,
resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts,"
Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any
point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as
wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.
The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep,
rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish
bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section,
to bare wood.
"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original
varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each
maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made
his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum
arabic from sub-Saharan trees.
Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with
mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior
owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919,
it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly
returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from
his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not
until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a
deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.
Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow
much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.
All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill
of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange
Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.
AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even
before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to
get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant."
At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that
sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with
titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move,
but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with
customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate
suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations
purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check
machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've
won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.
On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking
for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a
concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they
were of a mind to take note.
Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's
Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest
pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of
any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally
powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin,
so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."
Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the
most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's
exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single,
succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create
a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the
eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the
breadth of human possibility.
If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this
from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara
Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole
world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined
that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain
that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have
driven me out of my mind."
So, that's the piece Bell started with.
He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this
performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into
the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly
symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian
traffic filed past.
Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had
already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A
middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to
notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept
walking, but it was something.
A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a
buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance
that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that
Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang
around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven
gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change.
That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three
feet away, few even turning to look.
No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.
It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording
once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it
up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent
newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups
of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at
their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the
dingy, gray rush of modernity.
Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain
fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen,
unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not
really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.
IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE
REALLY ANY GOOD?
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about
the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two
millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried
Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each,
colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?
We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings
us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant,
picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had
just happened back there at the Metro.
"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the
music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."
Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but
Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature,
cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says,
who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What
he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion
as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller,
and you're telling a story."
With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe.
That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a
sidelong glance.
"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."
The word doesn't come easily.
". . . ignoring me."
Bell is laughing. It's at himself.
"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's
cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I
started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was
oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This
is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.
Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is
that, for some reason, he was nervous.
"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says.
"I was stressing a little."
Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the
anxiety at the Washington Metro?
"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already
validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already
accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What
if they resent my presence . . ."
He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a
lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen
-- on January 12.
MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY
KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National
Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he
has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.
"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an
Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52
steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant
columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting.
And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art
for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang
that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to
notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a
little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"
Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro
passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.
Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty
is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a
caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's
most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German
philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing
conditions must be optimal.
"Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your
report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right."
So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a
thousand unimpressed passersby?
"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."
And that's that.
Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind
that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's
bow first touched the strings.
White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David
Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from
Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and
15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell
this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first
look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty
good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't
race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is
that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.
It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an
international program at the Department of Energy; on this day,
Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most
exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he
says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars,
where will it go, that sort of thing."
On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look
around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn
back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early
for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.
Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close
as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he
really likes.
As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the
second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it
moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious,
exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music
becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.
Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he
says, "it made me feel at peace."
So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a
street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people
pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the
Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his
life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was
special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.
THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL
TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right
after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who
hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No
applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous
chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving
right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.
After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised
some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed
religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking
work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety?
Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never
forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that
kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right
and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar
and enduring religious pieces in history.
A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and
her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly
and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.
"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a
federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush
Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training
facility in the basement."
Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the
parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being
propelled toward the door.
"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He
wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between
Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the
arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what
she walked out on, she laughs.
"Evan is very smart!"
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born
with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is
in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the
poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who
stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast
majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians,
young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But
the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every
single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And
every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO
THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to
work. He was at work.
The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead
into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street
and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au
Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works
in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper
packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye
of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was.
But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within
his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain
property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd
lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the
fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was
steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty
well.
"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was
clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the
sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.
"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well,
that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."
A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes
five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than
Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the
entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine
spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.
J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he
played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't
recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like
generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in
"Titanic," before the iceberg.
"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make
a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said,
but he spent all his cash on lotto.
When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world,
he laughs.
"Is he ever going to play around here again?"
"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."
"Damn."
Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.
BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel
Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and
then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's
got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining
bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife
version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.
Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one
thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of
a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't
pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm
makin' a lot of noise!"
He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact
that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole
bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem
to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward,
quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.
Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't
take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about
not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.
It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they
were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones
spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.
And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services
Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and
headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory
that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.
"Where was he, in relation to me?"
"About four feet away."
"Oh."
There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He
was listening to his iPod.
For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not
expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news
from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what
we already know; we program our own playlists.
The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by
the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The
meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts
to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point:
It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of
his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until
she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in
front of your eyes.
"YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him
struck me as much of anything."
You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people
who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she
wasn't noticing the music at all.
"I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure
out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make
much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or
for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it
financially."
What do you do, Jackie?
"I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service.
I just negotiated a national contract."
THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or
less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine
on your shoes.
Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence
Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he
liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My
father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and
shined."
Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got
a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and
a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The
shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more
upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he
tried to calm her down.
Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza
for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when
they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So
she fights.
Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top
of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the
management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician
will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way,
she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the
mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.
What about Joshua Bell?
He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag,
sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians,
but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call
the police."
Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that
people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If
something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to
see. Not here."
Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple
of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there
and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to
see or slowed down to look.
"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own
business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies
Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what
happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's
sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about
their ability to appreciate life?
We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831,
when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the
States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the
degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else,
by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.
Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless,
darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of
modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director
Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily
business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines,
robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant
Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.
"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance."
In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life,
British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for
beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be
symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the
capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen
to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever
written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf
and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?
That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published
those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The
thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite
that way before.
Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He
wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a
policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.
THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in
the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a
baldish head.
Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final
piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop
dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to
the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine
stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next
nine minutes.
Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was
stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his
phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an
article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like
everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to
him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted,
Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.
"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant
Plaza."
Haven't you seen musicians there before?
"Not like this one."
What do you mean?
"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber.
He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good
fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear
him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."
Really?
"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a
brilliant, incredible way to start the day."
Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't
recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of
the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a
run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see
Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.
"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't
registering. That was baffling to me."
When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously,
intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he
decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you
sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into
another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service.
Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.
When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You
can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking
at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly
walks away from the man he once wanted to be.
Does he have regrets about how things worked out?
The postal supervisor considers this.
"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's
not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."
BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES,
in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one
person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice
Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a
public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She
didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man
playing it has a gift.
Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned
to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want
to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for
The Washington Post.
In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how
to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that
there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as
sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would
surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people
gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was?
Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people
flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers
flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.
As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive
until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the
Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about
classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier,
at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the
international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea
what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to
miss it.
Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center.
She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained
planted in that spot until the end.
"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington,"
Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and
people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping
quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was
thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could
happen?"
When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a
twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final
haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave
pennies.
"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering.
That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I
wouldn't have to pay an agent."
These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk.
Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna
Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has
received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful
intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make
your heart thump and weep at the same time.")
Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back
in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting
the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the
best classical musician in America
Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom
Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff
writer, can be reached at . He will be fielding
questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m.
--
ha
Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam
40401721_pf.html> (Nice videos, too.)
Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C.
rush hour? Let's find out.
By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007;
HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED
HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was
nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a
Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a
violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few
dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian
traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush
hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical
pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to
work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant
Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly
mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles:
policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist,
facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in
any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the
cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of
guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden
demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be
polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's
really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the
moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in
an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing
against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of
the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world,
playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most
valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The
Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities
-- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal
setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might
have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that
have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music
befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.
The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of
utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the
outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and
resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the
human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and
laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring,
flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal,
sumptuous.
So, what do you think happened?
HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was
asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically,
if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a
traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?
"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken
for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's
really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in
Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be
35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100
will stop and spend some time listening."
So, a crowd would gather?
"Oh, yes."
And how much will he make?
"About $150."
Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really
happened.
"How'd I do?"
We'll tell you in a minute.
"Well, who was the musician?"
Joshua Bell.
"NO!!!"
A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an
internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the
Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony
Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at
the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a
standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they
stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that
Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for
the attention of busy people on their way to work.
Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee
at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to
perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to
examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged
to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The
curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.
"Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm
thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ."
He smiled.
". . . on Kreisler's violin."
It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick --
and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced
showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august.
He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also
appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in
feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie
"The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta
Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best
Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a
god."
When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform
at rush hour, he said:
"Uh, a stunt?"
Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?
Bell drained his cup.
"Sounds like fun," he said.
Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like
dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he
performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in
white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro,
in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling.
That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his
technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost
dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.
He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In
Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the
very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea
of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate
of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the
performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell.
Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview
magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings
why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously,
with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw."
For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for
participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether,
in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His
condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an
overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose
work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he
said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.
It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that
will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.
It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in
question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a
congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that
manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.
One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first
music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents,
both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after
they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser
drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in
and out to vary the pitch.
TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell
took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.
Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using
another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted
in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden
period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest
spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to
perfection.
"Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he
just . . . knew."
Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist
shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck,
resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts,"
Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any
point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as
wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.
The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep,
rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish
bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section,
to bare wood.
"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original
varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each
maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made
his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum
arabic from sub-Saharan trees.
Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with
mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior
owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919,
it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly
returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from
his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not
until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a
deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.
Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow
much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.
All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill
of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange
Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.
AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even
before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to
get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant."
At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that
sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with
titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move,
but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with
customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate
suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations
purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check
machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've
won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.
On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking
for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a
concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they
were of a mind to take note.
Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's
Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest
pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of
any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally
powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin,
so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."
Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the
most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's
exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single,
succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create
a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the
eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the
breadth of human possibility.
If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this
from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara
Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole
world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined
that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain
that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have
driven me out of my mind."
So, that's the piece Bell started with.
He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this
performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into
the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly
symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian
traffic filed past.
Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had
already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A
middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to
notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept
walking, but it was something.
A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a
buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance
that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that
Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang
around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven
gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change.
That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three
feet away, few even turning to look.
No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.
It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording
once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it
up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent
newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups
of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at
their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the
dingy, gray rush of modernity.
Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain
fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen,
unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not
really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.
IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE
REALLY ANY GOOD?
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about
the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two
millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried
Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each,
colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?
We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings
us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant,
picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had
just happened back there at the Metro.
"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the
music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."
Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but
Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature,
cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says,
who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What
he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion
as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller,
and you're telling a story."
With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe.
That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a
sidelong glance.
"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."
The word doesn't come easily.
". . . ignoring me."
Bell is laughing. It's at himself.
"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's
cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I
started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was
oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This
is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.
Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is
that, for some reason, he was nervous.
"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says.
"I was stressing a little."
Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the
anxiety at the Washington Metro?
"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already
validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already
accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What
if they resent my presence . . ."
He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a
lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen
-- on January 12.
MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY
KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National
Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he
has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.
"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an
Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52
steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant
columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting.
And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art
for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang
that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to
notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a
little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"
Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro
passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.
Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty
is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a
caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's
most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German
philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing
conditions must be optimal.
"Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your
report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right."
So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a
thousand unimpressed passersby?
"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."
And that's that.
Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind
that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's
bow first touched the strings.
White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David
Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from
Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and
15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell
this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first
look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty
good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't
race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is
that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.
It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an
international program at the Department of Energy; on this day,
Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most
exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he
says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars,
where will it go, that sort of thing."
On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look
around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn
back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early
for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.
Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close
as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he
really likes.
As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the
second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it
moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious,
exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music
becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.
Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he
says, "it made me feel at peace."
So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a
street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people
pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the
Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his
life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was
special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.
THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL
TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right
after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who
hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No
applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous
chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving
right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.
After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised
some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed
religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking
work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety?
Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never
forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that
kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right
and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar
and enduring religious pieces in history.
A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and
her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly
and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.
"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a
federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush
Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training
facility in the basement."
Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the
parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being
propelled toward the door.
"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He
wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between
Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the
arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what
she walked out on, she laughs.
"Evan is very smart!"
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born
with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is
in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the
poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who
stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast
majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians,
young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But
the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every
single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And
every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO
THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to
work. He was at work.
The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead
into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street
and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au
Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works
in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper
packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye
of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was.
But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within
his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain
property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd
lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the
fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was
steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty
well.
"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was
clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the
sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.
"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well,
that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."
A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes
five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than
Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the
entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine
spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.
J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he
played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't
recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like
generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in
"Titanic," before the iceberg.
"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make
a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said,
but he spent all his cash on lotto.
When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world,
he laughs.
"Is he ever going to play around here again?"
"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."
"Damn."
Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.
BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel
Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and
then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's
got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining
bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife
version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.
Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one
thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of
a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't
pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm
makin' a lot of noise!"
He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact
that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole
bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem
to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward,
quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.
Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't
take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about
not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.
It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they
were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones
spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.
And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services
Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and
headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory
that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.
"Where was he, in relation to me?"
"About four feet away."
"Oh."
There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He
was listening to his iPod.
For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not
expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news
from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what
we already know; we program our own playlists.
The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by
the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The
meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts
to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point:
It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of
his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until
she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in
front of your eyes.
"YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him
struck me as much of anything."
You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people
who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she
wasn't noticing the music at all.
"I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure
out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make
much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or
for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it
financially."
What do you do, Jackie?
"I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service.
I just negotiated a national contract."
THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or
less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine
on your shoes.
Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence
Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he
liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My
father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and
shined."
Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got
a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and
a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The
shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more
upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he
tried to calm her down.
Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza
for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when
they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So
she fights.
Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top
of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the
management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician
will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way,
she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the
mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.
What about Joshua Bell?
He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag,
sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians,
but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call
the police."
Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that
people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If
something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to
see. Not here."
Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple
of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there
and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to
see or slowed down to look.
"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own
business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies
Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what
happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's
sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about
their ability to appreciate life?
We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831,
when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the
States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the
degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else,
by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.
Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless,
darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of
modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director
Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily
business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines,
robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant
Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.
"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance."
In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life,
British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for
beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be
symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the
capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen
to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever
written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf
and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?
That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published
those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The
thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite
that way before.
Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He
wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a
policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.
THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in
the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a
baldish head.
Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final
piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop
dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to
the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine
stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next
nine minutes.
Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was
stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his
phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an
article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like
everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to
him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted,
Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.
"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant
Plaza."
Haven't you seen musicians there before?
"Not like this one."
What do you mean?
"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber.
He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good
fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear
him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."
Really?
"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a
brilliant, incredible way to start the day."
Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't
recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of
the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a
run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see
Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.
"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't
registering. That was baffling to me."
When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously,
intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he
decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you
sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into
another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service.
Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.
When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You
can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking
at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly
walks away from the man he once wanted to be.
Does he have regrets about how things worked out?
The postal supervisor considers this.
"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's
not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."
BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES,
in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one
person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice
Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a
public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She
didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man
playing it has a gift.
Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned
to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want
to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for
The Washington Post.
In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how
to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that
there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as
sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would
surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people
gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was?
Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people
flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers
flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.
As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive
until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the
Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about
classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier,
at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the
international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea
what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to
miss it.
Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center.
She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained
planted in that spot until the end.
"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington,"
Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and
people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping
quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was
thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could
happen?"
When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a
twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final
haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave
pennies.
"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering.
That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I
wouldn't have to pay an agent."
These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk.
Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna
Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has
received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful
intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make
your heart thump and weep at the same time.")
Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back
in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting
the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the
best classical musician in America
Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom
Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff
writer, can be reached at . He will be fielding
questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m.
--
ha
Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam