Thanks!

He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station in Washington, DC and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket.

By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap.

From a small case, he removed a violin.  Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was cold at 7:51am on Friday, January 12th, 2007.  But the indoor heating from the station, shops, and people protected the instrument from damage.

He played six Bach pieces over the course of the next 43 minutes.

During that time, since it was rush hour, it  was calculated that just over a thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

A couple of minutes into it,something revealing happened.

A woman and her preschooler emerged from the escalator.  The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so was the child.  She held his hand. He kept twisting around to look at the violinist, as he was propelled toward the door by his mother.

“I had a time crunch,” recalled the woman later.  “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush [my 3 year-old son] off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.  There was a musician, and my son was intrigued.  He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.”

So she did what she had to do.  She deftly moved her body between her son’s and the violinist’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight.  As they exited the arcade, the son was still craning to look.

Another minute went by before a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing.  The man slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A half-minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the violin case and, without stopping, continued to walk.

The action of the first woman was repeated by several  other children.  All the parents, without exception, forced their children to  move on.

About 5 or 6 minutes into the performance, someone leaned against the wall to listen, but then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

Clearly he was late for work.

In the 43 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a minute or more.  About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace.  He collected $32.17.

When he finished playing and silence took over, only a few people who’d just stopped to listen for the last minute or so noticed it. No one applauded, exactly one person recognized him.

None of the other commuters knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in  the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth $3.5 million.

Two days before  his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in  Boston and the price for merely “pretty good” seats was $100.  He was used to getting paid about $1,000 a minute for his performances.

This is a real  story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people.

The outlines  were:

in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we  perceive beauty?

Do we stop to appreciate it?

Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the  possible conclusions from this experience could  be:

If we do not have a moment to stop

and listen to

one of the best musicians

in the  world

playing the best music

ever written,

how many other things are we missing?

Here are a few related links:

Original article, with video clips from the performance.

Answers to some of the questions people have asked about it.

The Audio recording of Joshua Bell’s full Metro performance.

Also, a few interesting excerpts from the original article:

Expert opinion on what would happen (prior to knowing the outcome):

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked … [w]hat 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!!!”

Bell’s perspective prior to the event:

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 one precondition:

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.

Bell’s comments on his Stradivarious 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.

On the first piece he would play, Chaconne by J.S. Bach:

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.”

Bell’s observations immediately following his performance:

[Josh was] 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 . . .”

I find it somewhat amazing… someone so accomplished, and so famous (even though I’d never heard of him), still had that all-too-common fear of rejection… the need to be loved, and the accompanying fear of not being appreciated, or possibly even being resented.