The Washington Post ran an interesting experiment back in January. They had Joshua Bell, who shortly thereafter was recognized as the best classical musician in America, play for 43 minutes as a street musician outside the L’Enfant Plaza metro stop during the morning rush hour. The results and some discussion are available here.
What a great piece! Thanks for the link.
I don’t suppose that was the guy that was playing the violin outside L’Enfant plaza this morning was it?
Quite often there’s a Chinese man playing an instrument that looks like this outside of the Metro Center station. It’s quite a refreshing change to hear as you’re coming up the escalator.
I liked that article, but I thought it was a little unfair. Classical music takes some atttention to truly appreciate. It’s not surprising that morning commuters, distracted with thoughts of the day ahead, might have been oblivious to the guy’s virtuosity. Some of them might not have noticed the music at all. In a more relaxed context, they may have been blown away.
Yea, after reading the article I’m embarrassed to admit that I was one of the commuters that blew by him without a second glance. I work at the U.S Department of Education and I always come through that exit in the mornings. I’m kind of mad that I missed out on the opportunity to stop and really appreciate his music, but when I’m on the way to work I tend to mostly block out everything around me. He’s not the first musician to be playing there and I kind of just assumed he was another run of the mill busker.
Oh well. 
I sent the article to a bunch of people, and as I said to one of them, “I like to think I would have stopped, but I’m not sure I would have.”
This came up in a guitar forum I frequent. I posted these comments:
The lukewarm response to the world-class violinist busking may have been due in part to location: people enroute to the subway are generally in too much of a hurry to listen to music.
But I think there’s another, sadder reason: the ubiquity of recorded music, most of it forced with ulterior motives on the public. As a result, even a world-class busker sounds, at first glance, like just another nuisance.
Examples include muzak in stores (designed to get people in the mood to buy stuff), and monster car stereos (as far as I can tell, designed to annoy everybody).
In the days before you heard recorded music everywhere you turned, it was a delightful treat to hear someone playing an instrument in public. If you played the piano competently, you were more likely to be invited to parties.
I’m not a Luddite – if it weren’t for recorded music, I’d never have heard 99% of the music I love today. But as a musician, I feel entitled to bemoan what technology has done to the value of a good live performance.
Geez. How about they try the experiment again, but on a Saturday? It hardly seems fair to draw harsh conclusions about people who are on their way to work, rushing against a deadline.
The Field Museum was hosting several high school orchestras and bands the last time we were there - I don’t know why they’d arranged back-to-back performances, but it was lovely. People responded quite well, paid attention, applauded. But of course, they were there IN ORDER TO pay attention to their environment.
I don’t know, I can’t imagine ALL the federal beaurocrats running around couldn’t spare five minutes from work. Is everyone running so fast and on such tight timeframes?
I think its that we see busking as a form of begging. “Don’t look at the poor man, honey, it isn’t polite.” We don’t stop for long enough to form an opinion of “good or bad” - we don’t listen - just that some poor schlepp in singing for his supper and maybe you throw in a handful of change if you walk by, or maybe you don’t, but its a sort of shameful thing to be singing for your supper and it isn’t polite to call attention to his shame.
If it would have turned into a performance (and I got the feeling that there were three or four people “paying attention” at the end of the performance - that number might have grown fairly quickly had he played for another fifteen minutes), then people would have started to stop - following the crowd. At some point people start “just following the crowd” - they stand in lines that they don’t know what they are for. They listen to music that other people seem to be valuing.
I’ve done some street theatre in places (RenFaires) where people were expecting to be entertained - and its really hard to get people to stop at watch, even when they are supposed to.
I wonder if his “take” for his playing was more or less than the guy who usually grabs that spot.
You’ve never seen DC in the morning. I get into Union station at around 7 in the morning and people are running full bore from the train station to catch the Metro (subway) downstairs. It’s 7 in the fricking morning and the metro runs every 3-4 minutes! These people are wearing suits and are in a flat out sprint!
It’s crazy.
One guy is so bad that when the train unloads the passengers say in unison…
“On your mark…”
“Get set…”
“GO!”
Bam! Off he runs.
I agree completely – the experiment was nonsense. You can’t expect a musician, even if he’s a world-class violinist, to capture the attention of exhausted morning commuters who are late for work.
Do the experiment again on a weekend or even the evening rush, and I bet you the results would be different.
Consider yourself lucky. There’s a fellow around here that strangles one of those things at the BART stations until the station agents go bonkers from all the screeching and kick him out.
I have noticed good musicians in the past, but the problem is they’re so uncommon. The guy with the Chinese violin can only saw out a really choppy and dissonant “twinkle twinkle little star.” The guy with the recorder haltingly squeaks out “somewhere over the rainbow” and up on the street, there’s someone abusing a trumpet to mangle “when the saints go marching in.” And none of these guys are playing the songs - just those phrases - just a few bars, over and over again. The only busker I’ve noticed recently with any an ability to successfully play a tune from start to finish is the mariachi guitarist. His singing seems a bit off key, (in key or not, I have no idea what the words are) but at least he’s not murdering music.
When a string quartet showed up one morning, I did hang around and listen for a short while - probably only thirty seconds - as I had to get to work.
In a way, buskers are doing what we call Guerrilla Theater at the Ren Faire. You have two seconds to capture someone’s attention. The musicians have a similar sliver of time to catch your ear, or be just more background noise.
I tend to stop for buskers if it’s an instrument I’m not used to seeing performed as often. Banjo? Yes. Guitar–no. Clarinet, yes. Sax–no. Violin isn’t that uncommon, so as good as the guy was, I’d be less inclinced to stop (unless he was playing a piece I particularly liked).
But there isn’t anything empirical or conclusive about this stunt (since “experiment”'s just a misnomer).
I think the mistake was morning rush hour too. Talk to any busker, that is the worst time to make anything precisely because people are on their way to work.
When I’m on my way to work, I don’t have time to stop. Most people don’t, they’ve got to get themselves to work and don’t have the time to stop and hang around.
At lunch hour or the end of the day, people are more likely to stroll along and take it easy. Maybe stop if something catches their ear and be inclined to toss something into the case. Actually, I used to know a busker (a decent guitar player, who had more than 3 songs in his repetoire and sang on key) and that’s when I’d find him playing the most. Lunch and after work.
Unfortunately, there are some really bad players out there. I usually just walk faster and try not to cringe too much.
I don’t know if I’d stop for him. At the very least, if I had the time, I’d slow down to take it in before I walked out of hearing range.
Yeah, that was my reaction too: when I got a few paragraphs in, where Weingarten says they were going to do this during the morning rush hour, my thought was “game over.”
In the morning, people are half awake, they’re in a hurry to get to where they’re going, they’re blocking out the world. Whatever this was supposed to show, doing this experiment during the a.m. rush hour wasn’t a fair test.
Was this guy REALLY playing a $2.3 million Stradivari violin? I wonder wht his insurance company would say, if some wino grabbed the violin and smashed it to bits?
(DC Wino) to police: “Officer, I was hung over…and this guy kept making awful noises”!
It must be the venue. There is a boy in both of my son’s orchestras. He is very gifted, although obviously not in Bell’s league. He is in 10th grade, and has played in a professional orchestra, but not exactly a world class orchestra. One day, he took his violin to a supermarket here in good ol’ middle class, almost-entirely-a-suburb, conservative-as-in-tight-as-they-come-don’t-tax-us Colorado Springs. This is not a community known for appreciation of the arts.
He made over $200 in a couple of hours.
I think the real value of this experiment is to ARTISTS – so often, we take rejection to mean we’re simply not good enough, because that’s OUR big fear. But in reality, it’s all about marketing.
I draw little inexpensive portraits, and the response I receive depends greatly on the venue. At some events, people line up waiting for their turn (and get really miffed if I run out of time to draw them all).
Yet at other events I’ve been ignored for hours and just barely earned back the booth fee.
Over time I’ve learned that it has much more to do with the audience and their expectations than with the quality of my work. I happened to start off with some good ones, just by sheer luck.
I’d like to think that back in my Metro commuting days, I’d have stopped and listened to him – I played violin for ten years and hearing one note of the tone of that instrument, I would hope, would have stopped me in my tracks. (And I worked for people cool enough that the excuse for call in late of “there was this unbelievable violinist in the Metro this morning!” would have sufficed, too.)
But I suspect I would have totally zoned out, like everyone else. Going home? I definitely would have stopped and stayed as long as he was there.
Man, the music in those video clips was just glorious!!