Friday, April 27, 2007

Who cares?

I missed this when it was published a couple of weeks ago, but I think it's worth a post now for those who didn't see it. The Washington Post devised a little experiment: plant one of the world's most famous classical musicians, the violinist Joshua Bell, in a Metro station in D.C. during the morning rush hour. Wearing a baseball cap and long-sleeved tee-shirt, he stands against a wall, opens the case in front of him for donations, and plays for 43 minutes. Hidden camera. How many people will stop and listen? How many will throw him some money, and how much? How many will recognize him? "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

The WaPo must have had a number of undercover operatives running around L'Enfant Plaza because the paper contacted 40 people who came through the station. The article, by Gene Weingarten, says 1,097 people passed by while Bell played. (1,100 wasn't good enough.) A number of the listeners or non-listeners get little portraits and interviews in the piece, which is very long. Some fumble out explanations for buzzing right by, or just 'fess up: "'I didn't think nothing of it,' Tillman says, 'just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.'" There's a shoeshine woman who gets annoyed by buskers and says this was the first time she didn't call the police.

The piece makes you wait a good while before giving the results. They aren't pretty. He nets $32.17, not including a twenty from the one person who recognized Bell ("tainted by recognition").

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.... That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

"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.

I think this is my favorite bit, though:

A couple of minutes into [the video], 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.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:29 PM

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