Ever since I first expressed an interest in street performers, people have been sending me links to Pearls Before Breakfast, a Pulitzer Prize winning article by Gene Weingarten. In it, he describes how Joshua Bell, one of the most famous violinists in the world, busked using a $3.5 million Stradivarius in the Washington D.C. subway system.
Reading that, you might think (as I did) that a brilliant musician playing a fabulous instrument would surely draw a crowd. And yet Joshua Bell — who normally packs out concert halls selling tickets for hundreds of dollars — made just $32.17, and barely anyone stopped to listen.
The experiment lead Weingarten to imply a series of conclusions: that we can’t recognise beauty out of context; that commuters are too busy to appreciate genius; that we are too closed minded in general; even that maybe the average Washington D.C. commuter is a philistine.
But he proved none of that.
Although the writing in the article is good, a brief look at the details of the experiment shows that it was based on false assumptions and was executed poorly. The questions raised are interesting, but the answers given are unreliable at best, obnoxious at worst, and refuted by my personal experience; I lived with a subway violinist, Chen Cong, who showed me you can earn a good living performing to adoring crowds on a cheap violin.
But we’ll get to Chen later. First, the experiment’s flaws…
The wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong song
The experiment took place at 7:51 a.m. Nobody’s on the subway at that hour who has time to kill; that’s the beginning of the morning rush hour. It was also January 11th, meaning it was bitterly cold outside (just 4ºC/40ºF). This was not a balmy summer evening, where work-weary commuters would enjoy spending some time watching a show on the way home. No, this test took place in the middle of winter, a mere half an hour after sunrise, when commuters would have been rushing to work, wrapped up very warm, and, according to many street performers I’ve spoken to about this, during “the post-Christmas pinch”, when people’s purses are just a little tighter than they were.
Restrictions on where busking could take place meant that Weingarten was forced to place Bell in the small gap between the top of an escalator and a doorway, giving passersby not much room to stop and listen. Also, people would be coming through the doors, out of the cold, and have just a few seconds to hear the music, reach down underneath layers of warm clothing for their wallet, produce cash and get it into the violin case before stepping onto the escalator. Again, hardly ideal.
And to top it off, there’s the song choice. Bell didn’t choose music people would relate to easily. Instead, he chose to play a rare, academic piece that few people have ever heard. Here’s how Weingarten describes it:
“Chaconne” is … 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.”
If you’re sitting there thinking “that’s exactly what I want to hear on my morning commute!“, you’re in the minority. Buskers all over the world intentionally play music that people can relate to in a short period of time; that’s all the time they’ve got. Especially if they’re standing between a door and an escalator.
The Prejudice of Prestige
“In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell.”
If we rephrase the above quote, taken from Pearls, we get: “unsophisticated people don’t listen to classical music.” And if you think that this sounds ethnocentric, Weingarten went on to say in emails to disgusted readers that he didn’t accept that people from different cultures and backgrounds have different ideas about beauty. In other words, beauty is objective, and Weingarten knows what it is.
Still more tellingly, he describes the one man who seemed to appreciate Bell’s music fully as the “cultural hero of the day”, as if the other commuters were cultural villains (or cowards). Weingarten comes across like a Victorian scientist watching in disbelief as monkeys ignore a golden banana.
It makes my skin crawl. Below is how the experiment should have been done, and the results he would have found.
Chen Cong
Quite simply, he should have filmed Chen Cong, any day of the year.
Many years ago, when Chen was still a budding young violinist in China, Chairman Mao began his ruthless Cultural Revolution. All forms of Western music were banned, and Chen’s classically trained family (musicians and dancers) were turned into trench diggers and pig farmers. At one point he was so destitute he was secretly teaching people how to play the violin in return for heads of cabbage, and riding his bicycle from village to village, telling people stories at mealtimes in return for food.
Eventually, after several arduous years that would fill a book with stories of scarcity and survival, and after the end of the Maoist policies associated with the revolution, an old friend of his father’s in the classical world managed to find him an American sponsor who was willing to pay for Chen’s musical education in New York. Chen escaped China, did a masters in performance in The Big Apple and got very good reviews.
However, after he’d graduated he decided that if he wanted a conductor telling him what to play or how to play it, he could go back to China for that. So instead, he decided to make his money busking, playing whatever he liked.
After some exploring of both his own tastes and the sensibilities of the New Yorkers around him, he chose the fairly quiet platform of the F train’s 57th Street station as his concert hall. It wasn’t busy, and in the afternoons and evenings he would make the most out of the long silences between passing trains. Here’s my first video of him, taken years ago (please excuse the quality, but the response at 2:27 is so cute from the crowd!)
At one point people were taking deck chairs and newspapers down to the subway to listen to Chen play. Both times I filmed him people stayed for over 30 minutes to listen (some for an hour or more), and both times people in the audience actually wiped away tears. People of all ages, races and genders also danced, laughed, clapped, cheered “bravo!” between songs, made eye contact with each other, felt calm and relaxed…in fact, they acted privileged to have experienced the music coming from Chen’s cheap violin.
Had Weingarten studied this humble and warm musician after his debacle with Joshua Bell, he might have been surprised at how well Chen did, both with the audience and with his tips. On most days, Chen’s music touches many people, reaching their minds and hearts on his cheap violin, and he’s paid handsomely for it.
But does Chen teach us anything?
Probably not. But Chen’s story does show that skill, fame and pomp are no substitute for experience when it comes to street performing. Oh, and perhaps that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I think it’s important not to judge humans on how they treat any one person in any one setting. After all, subway riders in New York also have the unnerving habit of ignoring dead people. Or, as has been my own experience, for defecating and attempting to solicit fellatio. Well, maybe that does teach us something about the city.