A Concert Violinist Plays the Subway Station

A couple months ago, folks at the Washington Post came up with a social experiment: place violinist Joshua Bell in a Washington, D.C. Metro station and see if anyone notices. You are encouraged to read the full article here. The article is long but fascinating, filled with points of philosophy, sociology, and of course a few anecdotes on classical music and Bell himself. It also features video of Bell's Metro station performance and the few people who stopped to watch him.

Just over a thousand people passed him by on their way to work that morning, and only a handful noticed. Even fewer stopped to listen. One person recognized him. None of which is a judgment on the thousand commuters who kept walking. I readily submit to you my ignorance on classical music - that being said, I do like it and often listen to the classical station in the car. However, I too probably would have kept on walking. I know this because when I lived in San Francisco I climbed out of the Embarcadero Station every week day for nearly three years and only once or twice did I stop to listen to the musicians playing inside - and those one or two times happened at the end of the day, when I had all the time in the world to devote to listening to some guy play his saxophone at the bottom of the stairs.

That leads me to my other theory on why no one stopped to listen. I've already admitted that I know next to nothing about classical music. I know I like it when it sounds pretty or when I've been listening long enough and really get into a piece, but I know nothing about playing, composing or music theory in general: I wouldn't know a good performance if it slapped me upside the head. For the majority of us, we need someone else to point it out, to tell us to stop and listen. Then some of us will do just that. Some of us will sincerely enjoy it, some will convince ourselves we've enjoyed it because we've been told to, and others will still keep walking because it's just not their cup of tea.

The most fascinating finding of the experiment?

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

There is a dangerous tendency to analyze the experiment and humbug the thousand people who had to get to work, to wag our fingers at them and say they were too consumed by bureaucracy or the almighty dollar. That almighty dollar is a roof over my head, food in my child's belly, clothes on his back. It would be great if we could all live a life of leisure and get to know the finer things, but that's not how our society is structured. You work for what you have so you can more enjoy the time off. And for some people, that scheduled time off includes a ticket to see Joshua Bell play his violin.