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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=topnews
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; Page W10
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
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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.
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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
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"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
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; Page W10
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
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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.
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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
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"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
