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.
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
On that Friday in January, 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
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,
"Here's what I'm
thinking,"
He smiled.
“ …on Kreisler's violin."
It was a snazzy, sequined idea, part
inspiration and part gimmick, and it was typical of
When
"Uh, a
stunt?"
Well, yes. A
stunt. Would he think it … unseemly?
"Sounds like fun," he
said.
He's single and straight, a fact not
lost on some of his fans. In
For this incognito performance,
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
To get from his hotel to the metro,
a distance of three blocks,
"Our knowledge of acoustics is
still incomplete,"
The front of
"This has never been
refinished,"
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
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.
If
So, that's the piece
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,
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,"
Playing the violin looks
all-consuming, mentally and physically, but
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."
"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,
"It wasn't exactly stage
fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a
little."
"When you play for
ticket-holders,"
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
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
"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
White guy, khakis,
leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is
on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from
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
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
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
"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
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
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.
Watching the video weeks later,
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,
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
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
"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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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."
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
As it happens, exactly one person
recognized
Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet
away from
"It was the most astonishing
thing I've ever seen in
When it was over, Furukawa
introduced herself to
"Actually,"
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.")
By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, April 8, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html