Joshua Bell and the Price of Music
p2pnet news view Cool| Music:- Head over to this Washington Post video and IMO, if this doesn’t do something for you, no matter what your taste in music, there’s no hope.
It’s a violin piece by virtuoso Joshua Bell, and it’ll stir your soul.
But he isn’t performing in a concert hall.
Instead, “Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?” – wondered the Washington Post in the intro to an amazing experiment.
This was back in 2007 but John Chalmers, a m8 of mine in Peterborough, Ontario, thinks it’s still special.
And he’s correct.
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked what he thought would happen if, “one of the world’s great violinists performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people”.
Bell agreed to give it a shot, and nor was he playing just any old fiddle: it was a Stradivarius reportedly worth close to $4 million.
“Let’s assume,” the story has Slatkin saying, “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.”
- WP: So, a crowd would gather?
- S: “Oh, yes.”
- WE: And how much will he make?
- S: “About $150.”
At the end of the Post’s long write-up, “It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” it has Stacy Furukawa, who’d stopped to listen, saying »»»
Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn’t do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?”
When it was over, “Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty,” says the story, adding:
“Not counting that – it was tainted by recognition – the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.
“Actually,” it quotes Bell as saying, “that’s not so bad, considering. That’s 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent.”
Below is a video of Bell playing Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair.
Cheers!
Jon
January , 2009
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