In 2005, I spent a wonderful summer in New York City, staying with an old friend in Greenwich Village. Having spent most of my life on the Florida West Coast, I was fascinated by almost every aspect of the city, even things which were just unavoidable annoyances to the indigenous populace. Like those musicians that hang out on the street corners and in the subway, serenading a mostly-indifferent crowd of jaded city dwellers. No indifference from me, though, I was a tourist. And I was as charmed by the street musicians as the tourists I see on my own stomping grounds are by sea shells and mouse ears. I'd always stop and listen for a few minutes, even to the bad ones, and drop a dollar or two into the guitar case or whatever was passing for a tip jar.

With that tourist-in-the-big-city attitude, what a shame I didn't take a similar jaunt to Washington, D.C. during the winter of 2006-2007. I might just have been in the right place at the right time to have joined only 7 people who interrupted their harried morning routines to hear some the greatest music ever composed being performed on a $3.5 million Stradivarius by one of the finest classical musicians in the world, Joshua Bell.

According to this article in the Washington Post archives, the internationally acclaimed virtuoso agreed to an experiment in which he would stand beside a trash can at the L'Enfant Plaza Station, incognito in jeans, sweatshirt, and a baseball cap, and spend 45 minutes doing what street musicians do--trying to gather a crowd and turn a profit. He didn't phone it in, either. Bell launched the performance with "Chaconne" from Bach's Partita No.2 in D Minor, considered one of the most difficult of all violin pieces to master.

So, how'd the experiment pan out? In a nutshell, Bell's magnificent concert fell almost entirely on deaf ears. Of the 1097 hurried Washington commuters that passed, only 7 stopped for at least one minute to take in the show. Only 27 tossed donations into the case of one of the most valuable violins in existence, most without even pausing.

Draw your own conclusions from the results, of course, be it the musical tastes of Washingtonians or the value of advertising (this had to be, after all, the most poorly promoted concert of Bell's career), or, of course, the obvious lesson about stopping to smell the roses...and hear the Stradivarius. I keep thinking--very appropriately, considering the chosen venue--of Robert Hastings' excellent essay, The Station.

And, just a personal observation regarding the performer himself: He sounds like one heck of a cool guy. Joshua Bell had only one condition for participating in the experiment. When it was described to him as "a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius," he requested that the word "genius" be struck from all reference to the study. "Genius" is an overused word, he said, and while it could be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, he considered it an unseemly and inaccurate word to apply to himself. Regarding his relatively modest compensation for the performance, he laughed, "Actually, that's not so bad, considering. That's forty bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

Again, the article in its entirety can be found here--with actual video of the event itself!--and, if you haven't caught it already, it's well worth checking out.