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 ...
He said a ton of things I would call nonsense. Talent and wisdom are not always together in the same person.
ping
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.
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?"
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.
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. :-)
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
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!
Emerson, unfortunately, wrote a great deal of nonsense, some of which actually caused harm. The New England Transcendentalists have much to answer for.
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?
What a blessing.
That alone is enough to invalidate any point he has about missing beauty.
jw
The violon is so damn dramatic... I have enough drama in my life.
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.
ping
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.
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.
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."
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.
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