My brother sent me a link to a fascinating article in the Washington Post on a little experiment the newspaper carried out: they took one of the best violinists in the world (Joshua Bell), put him in a Washington DC metro station and had him play his Stradivarius anonymously to the rush-hour crowd to see whether art and beauty could trump the distraction and stress of the morning commuter.

They couldn’t.

All but a handful of people completely ignored the virtuoso violinist performing in their midst. This surprised me somewhat less than it seemed to surprise the reporters writing the article. As someone who has spent a lot of time watching friends busk (and who has, on occasion, busked herself), I’m well aware that the average person about town—be it commuter, shopper or whoever—doesn’t generally take much notice of incidental art in the form of street musicians, now matter how well the musicians play.

This is particularly true in the age of the iPod and cell phone. The vast majority of people walking down the street in Brighton just aren’t really there; they’re physically there, but they all have the glazed look of the mentally absent as they lose themselves in their private music or their (not-so-private) telephone conversations or their text messages. It freaks me out a bit, to be honest—but maybe that’s just because I’m one of the very few people who finds it difficult, if not downright uncomfortable, to try to hold a telephone conversation, send a text message or keep earbuds in my ears while loping down the street.

I know how soul-destroying it can be to play your heart out and have no one pay any attention to you—and that goes for playing gigs as well as for busking. You start to think the worst of the crowd (or lack thereof): that they’re all cold-hearted Philistines with no ear for music and no time for beauty. But the article has an interesting take on busking in particular as being “art without a frame.” In other words, context is everything. A painting worth millions of dollars hanging in a museum will attract a lot more attention than the same painting hanging on the wall of some café (and, by the same token, a urinal in a restroom will attract a lot less attention than a urinal on a pedestal in a museum). So a brilliant musician playing to a random crowd of commuters in a subway station is bound to attract less attention than that same musician playing in the context of an organized performance to a deliberately assembled audience.

The article points out that children were the only ones invariably drawn to the live music. I’ve seen this scenario countless times myself: Mother and child walk past busker on the sidewalk. Child slows down, stops, stares at musician. Mother stops, listens politely for a minute. Child continues to stare at musician. Mother gives child coin to put in musician’s case. Child absently accepts coin without taking eyes off musician. Child continues to stand, coin in hand, staring at musician, until mother physically nudges child towards the case and encourages child to put the money in before dragging child off again (or until child simply pockets the money himself—it’s happened). It’s a pity we lose that wonder with the world around us as we grow up. We have no time to stand and stare.

I honestly don’t know if would have stood and stared at Joshua Bell in the DC metro. I think I might have if I had caught him while he was playing Bach’s “Chaconne”—if only because, for weeks, a tiny scrap of paper has been floating around my desk with the words “Chaconne - D minor - Bach” on it, hastily scribbled after I heard the glorious piece of music on some TV show and it figuratively stopped me in my tracks. Whether it would have literally stopped me in my tracks is a matter of speculation. But I like to think I would have made time for beauty.

Further reading…