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Impervious to beauty and deadened to depravity
Jewish World Review ^ | May 2, 2007 | Rod Dreher

Posted on 05/02/2007 10:52:54 AM PDT by rhema

The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous Mr. Bell played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals.

And virtually nobody stopped to notice.

The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us. Something's wrong with us.

As Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote, "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?"

If we don't see the beauty that we should, we don't see the ugliness either. For much of my career I was a film critic, and saw just about every movie that came out. Every now and then, I'd take my wife to screenings with me, and I'd observe her flinching at intensely violent or explicitly erotic images onscreen. Though I shared her conservative moral sense, or so I thought, I pitied her oversensitivity.

And then I changed jobs. I went from seeing 30 or so movies a month to seeing maybe three. It was as if I'd been a heavy smoker who'd gone cold turkey and was shocked to experience my sense of taste returning. Without meaning to, I began to watch

(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: joshuabell; roddreher; subway; violin; violinist
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To: Prokopton

He said a ton of things I would call nonsense. Talent and wisdom are not always together in the same person.


41 posted on 05/02/2007 1:04:37 PM PDT by The Ghost of FReepers Past (Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light..... Isaiah 5:20)
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To: onedoug; stylecouncilor

ping


42 posted on 05/02/2007 1:57:14 PM PDT by windcliff
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To: rhema
I am trying to get to work. Excuse me for not stopping to stand in stunned awe but I bet if after a hard day of running that stick across strings you stopped at the quicky mart and discovered that they were out of milk/juice/water because we had been standing around listening to music rather then doing our jobs you would be quite ticked.

The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us.

No. We just have real priorities. I understand that reporters do not actually produce anything of value to the world at large and so would be quite oblivious to the fact that yes, if all of us "little people" stopped that there actually would be repercussions.

That is ok. We forgive you little dancing monkey.

43 posted on 05/02/2007 2:08:15 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (Mobile phones kill more people than exploding cupboards, ironing boards and Godzilla)
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To: windcliff; stylecouncilor
I'll usually give a dollar or so to buskers on the street who I feel are actually "doing" something rather than just hitting us up for "spare change" (what is that anyway?).

I'd like to think too that I could recognize true talent to the point that I might ask, "What are you doing playing out here an the street?"

44 posted on 05/02/2007 2:19:05 PM PDT by onedoug
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To: AnAmericanMother

This same friend “loaned” my son a cracked and beat up cello. It had falled off the back of a pick up. It’s a great cello. He had it repaired and has had a lot of people rave about it’s quality. The word “loan” is in quotes because she said he could have it forever as long as he used it which he does all the time but to give it back if he stops playing it. He plays five or six instruments.


45 posted on 05/02/2007 2:30:35 PM PDT by Mercat (I know my Redeemer Lives!)
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To: rhema

one other thing, my sons have both been at one time or another, street musicians. They began focusing on street musicians even as children and we always stopped and put money in the hat/case or whatever. I’m wondering whether this guy had his case laying out in front of him. :-)


46 posted on 05/02/2007 2:33:10 PM PDT by Mercat (I know my Redeemer Lives!)
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To: potlatch; PhilDragoo; ntnychik; MeekOneGOP; dixiechick2000

Several years ago my daughter was studying opera in Manhattan before going to Florence to study and perform in concerts and on television in Italy and most of Europe.

Just before Saint Patrick’s Day (she is not Irish - perhaps way back some 800 years ago there may be Irish who married a Scot...) she and one of her friends who was a violinist decided on their own to go to Grand Central Station and perform Irish music for the commuters.

They were not “selected” by the Washington Post or the New York Times or paid to perform - they just did it on their own for the thousands of people going thru GCS.

They performed for over six hours and the hurried commuters did not ignore them or pretend they were not there.

They gathered around and listened and joined in to some tunes and enjoyed the music and experience.

No, the violin was not a Stradivarius, and the music selections were not limited to classics - and the two young woman took many requests from the tired commuters and Grand Central became a little bit of Ireland for a brief time.

The article is interesting but I find it difficult to take one incident and make broad sweeping conclusions from it.

Washington DC and it’s outlying suburbs are hardly typical of America and Americans and are largely an odd and oversampled minority of residents, political hacks, staffers, lobbyists, and liberal (99.9%) Beltway journalists who are out of touch with the rest of the country -

PS - The two young women also returned with other students at Christmas where GCS management and staff and the commuters (many remembered them) did not chase them off for not performing only Bach or Beethoven -

(but they did play and sing some classical Christmas music too -)

I also have seen Beethoven performed by an aging black man on an old accordion in the NYC subways and Gershwin on the piano by Peter Nero at Trump Tower and a classical string quartet playing in Grand Central Station.

I recall Chet Atkins at Porky’s and somebody (after a few drinks) singing two songs that got applause.

I remember bring a Conneticut rock & roll band to Porky’s to audition = Porky Baines passed - and we went on to Lenny’s which already had an older house band -

Lenny hired them after one set and still kept the house band

The band I brought there tore the house down and packed it seven nights a week for several years - several in the band are still performing in Miami (Hi Sturdy!)

Porky’s was just not the right club for that band and it’s local and tourist customers

A DC Metro station would not have been a good spot for Gene Krupa or Peggy Lee either -

The Washington Post made dumb choices

But they always do


47 posted on 05/02/2007 2:55:14 PM PDT by devolve ( -25%_the_little_fury_with_the_fringe_on_top_)
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To: Enchante
The WaPo “experiment” does not really show anything except that sane people don’t like to stop and hang around in subway stations.

From what I remember (from being there in 1987) the DC metro stations are not too bad. Now, I wouldn't hang around in a NY station, that's for sure!

48 posted on 05/02/2007 3:15:28 PM PDT by SuziQ
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To: Prokopton

Emerson, unfortunately, wrote a great deal of nonsense, some of which actually caused harm. The New England Transcendentalists have much to answer for.


49 posted on 05/02/2007 4:42:23 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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To: Mercat
When we found this violin (at the shop of a local instrument-seller) it was sitting with the much cheaper violins, like a racehorse that had fallen on evil days and was standing in the cab rank with the plugs . . .

It's a French instrument, made in Paris in the 1910s by one of the better known luthiers of the time. It was cracked in two places - one across the back and one across the face - but there is a very fine violin repair lady in Midtown Atlanta (she's German, a Bavarian, and very upright and stern, but she knows her business). She repaired it and it sounds like its old self again. The value is greatly reduced by the repairs, but who cares?

50 posted on 05/02/2007 4:49:12 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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To: AnAmericanMother

What a blessing.


51 posted on 05/02/2007 5:08:12 PM PDT by Mercat (I know my Redeemer Lives!)
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To: rhema
"...D.C. metro station during rush hour..."

That alone is enough to invalidate any point he has about missing beauty.

jw

52 posted on 05/02/2007 5:15:42 PM PDT by JWinNC (www.anailinhisplace.net)
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To: rhema

The violon is so damn dramatic... I have enough drama in my life.


53 posted on 05/02/2007 5:18:38 PM PDT by Porterville (God is love and Dog is evol)
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To: Mercat
It really is wonderful for her to have a good instrument to play on. We couldn't have afforded it otherwise.

She has started a string quartet at college with three like-minded friends. They are playing Handel and Haydn, mostly, good stuff! We play violin and harpsichord together when she's home.

54 posted on 05/02/2007 5:20:03 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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To: Cailleach

ping


55 posted on 05/02/2007 5:35:25 PM PDT by kalee (The offenses we give, we write in the dust; Those we take, we write in marble. JHuett)
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To: AnAmericanMother
Transcendentalism never had a rigid dogma nor a formal organization. The one statement of principles that was published contemporaneously reads: “Transcendentalism... maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses, or the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world,” and “it asserts that man has something besides the body of flesh, a spiritual body, with senses to perceive what is true, and right and beautiful, and a natural love for these, as the body for its food”.
How this could cause harm is not clear to me.
There was no membership in transcendentalism and some who claimed to adhere to it’s principles may have done harm but so have those who claim to adhere to every philosophy.
The original transcendentalists thinkers believed that there philosophy was a natural extension of the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence and this led some to be early fighters against slavery. Later, some like thinkers in England were early fighters against Nazism.
Your religious and/or philosophical beliefs may differ from those espoused by Emerson, but to call his writings “nonsense” is foolish and arrogant.
56 posted on 05/02/2007 5:56:26 PM PDT by Prokopton
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To: Enchante

It also proves that just because it is “classical music” we are supposed to assume that it is good. Some people do not like or understand classical music and it sounds like noise.


57 posted on 05/02/2007 5:58:42 PM PDT by LetsRok
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To: Prokopton
Don't put words in my mouth. I said he wrote some nonsense, not that everything he wrote was nonsense. Big difference.

My favorite Emerson nonsense is when he wrote that he was bathed in Nature and became an eyeball . . . or words to that effect. One of the other Transcendentalists at Brook Farm caricatured Emerson as a huge eyeball with a top hat walking on stalky legs over the countryside. So I'm not the only one who thinks he talked some nonsense.

Brook Farm alone did a tremendous amount of harm, as Hawthorne perceived in his Blythedale Romance. Like some of the Communist theories, some of Emerson's ideas were pernicious when put into practice.

58 posted on 05/02/2007 6:13:09 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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To: AnAmericanMother
My favorite Emerson nonsense is when he wrote that he was bathed in Nature and became an eyeball

What a soulless life you must lead. I take it you live in an urban jungle. Anyone who has had the pleasure of being alone in a forest can connect with the beautiful thoughts of Emerson. As you apperantly can't, I feel sorry for you.

"Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear I think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and a sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed,, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

59 posted on 05/02/2007 6:35:49 PM PDT by Prokopton
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To: Prokopton
Wow, are you Emerson's lineal descendant or something?

I'm sorry, but the passage you quoted is overstated piffle.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so -- Emerson's contemporary and friend at Brook Farm thought he went too far on this one. Are you going to say that he's "soulless" too?

Mark Twain, though an infidel at times, was dead on the money in his 1877 speech to the Boston Atheneum. The florid verbiage of the Transcendentalists is like the great-aunt's wax roses under glass.

Try Wordsworth instead, more matter in less room:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

60 posted on 05/02/2007 8:37:28 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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