Would you notice beauty?
Monday, April 9th, 2007There’s an interesting article in the Washington Post about a small musical experiment that was conducted.
To sum up, they had Joshua Bell, a virtuoso classical violinist, play for 45 minutes during the morning rush hour in L’Enfant Plaza (a train station) in Washington D.C. The idea of the experiment was to see how many people would stop and listen, having no clue one of the best violinists in the world playing on a $3.5 million dollar instrument was performing mere feet away.
Unsurprisingly, almost no one stopped. Of those who did, most of them either played the violin (or did at one time), or knew who he was (one person). Most people didn’t even remember there was a musician there. It’s an interesting experiment, but one that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know: that Americans are concerned with getting to work at 7:51 in the morning. Even I, who knows who Joshua Bell is and admires classical music, probably wouldn’t have stopped for more than a few minutes if it meant being late for work. The average person certainly wouldn’t recognize a niche celebrity or have any clue how good the music was other than the notion of “I guess that didn’t suck”.
Would a different thing have happened in another city or another country? Maybe. Probably. But I don’t think there would have been a huge difference. As the article mentions, context is everything. It’s hard to appreciate something if you aren’t looking for it or don’t know it’s there. Or it could be they all meant to ignore him, since everyone knows that violinists are snobs.