Bell, Stradivari and Bach in 2007

Music critic Rythmik generously offered to share his reading of the Joshua Bell experiment as a guest post, a first for Stingy Kids. The italicized quotes are from the Washington Post article "Pearls for Breakfast." If you haven't read this article yet, I suggest you take a look at it before reading Rythmik's critique.

Ok, well first of all. Joshua Bell is indeed an excellent violinist. As absurd as his little experiment was, we can’t deny him the recognition he’s earned. Serious music reaches a musical level in which an average listener’s mere opinions of like and dislike are no longer relevant. For instance, it’s not hard for anyone to love the sound of a Stradivarius, but if someone were to say that they don’t like it, well then simply put….they just don’t understand. True in this day and age it is now important for those involved in serious music to accept the theory that a casual listener doesn’t have to be musically knowledgeable in order to appreciate. However, as soon as the listener begins stating what is “good” or “bad”, we see that a musical understanding was needed from the start. And that is really the heart of the whole issue at hand.

So the Washington Post attempted to essentially make fools of the general public, mind you the music listening public, modern day American culture, and in the end Joshua Bell concert ticket holders. I think that all they succeeded in doing was waking up the classical/serious music world to their own ignorance rather than waking us up to ours. In “an unblinking assessment of public taste…would beauty transcend?” I ask, should it?

Why was this experiment done using a formally trained violinist? Why not a renowned percussionist, a rock guitarist or a famous jazz musician? Popular music has entered every aspect of our culture including that of serious music (i.e. neo-classicalism) to the point that we as Americans are no longer required to appreciate serious music in order to reach any higher elite level of musical appreciation. More so, modern day music has virtually erased the importance of context in musical performance.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

"The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment.

"I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible."

Well that’s because in a music hall the same people who ignored him at the metro believe that anything at that hall is great. They’ve been told that classical music is to be appreciated, loved and respected, but few truly understand what it is they are hearing. As a artist myself, I can only imagine what it must feel like to come to terms with the fact that your career is based upon a large percentage of listeners that have no real comprehension of your talent. Serious music culture must come away from this experience with a new found realization that many of the applauses, encores, etc. world-wide are demanded by these performers, not given in true appreciation for what they have just performed. Even within that world it is widely recognized that there only remains a small handful of cities in the world that are knowledgeable audiences of serious art. People attend performances simply because they are at a concert hall. If it’s not Joshua Bell on stage, then it’ll be someone else, but to the ears of the audience…it’s really not important.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Indeed it does, but more importantly, should this $5 million painting mean even more to us than our current art? Would the average museum goer recognize a modern popular artist? Perhaps the music and art of today is just as priceless to us as that of the past or that of serious art. What this article says really is that serious art must transcend time and place, yet modern art, however influential to the world it was created in, must remain where it is.

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

True, but perhaps this is just our new way of life to be accepted with new music to represent that, to echo the sounds of our subway stations, our youth, our fast paced lives, and to see and hear in every note the people who live in this day and age. This constant urge to criticize what we don’t appreciate or notice in art is what holds this era from recognizing the fine contributions it is has and continues to make. I think the real result of this experiment was that when Joshua Bell, Stradivari, and Bach stepped into the year 2007 that morning they found that they were simply part of the crowd.

Comments

[mr waggish]

Hi Rhythmik: I still disagree on a couple precepts. I could take a Stradivarius and make it sound horrible, and while Bell is certainly talented, he utterly fails to move me in the way that Oistrakh, Kogan, Szigeti, Kreisler, Milstein, and others do. I think that contemporary classical practices have caused a lot of this problem in emphasizing technical perfection over all else and releasing recordings filled with so many edits as to remove any organic flow from the piece. Maybe they were part of the crowd in the subway, but they weren't coming from a crowd I respect anyway. (With a couple exceptions: Argerich, Vengerov, and a select few others do transcend the stolid culture in which they exist.)

The "serious music world" is not so much ignorant of context as they are narrow-minded. I was at Jazz at Lincoln Center (an expensive ticket) the other week and as Cecil Taylor played, half of the primped, well-off audience left the theater! I got better seats, but there's more going on here than performance context. This isn't merely an Adornian art-as-use polemic, but a question of expectations and what people are trained to appreciate. That's why no mention is made of some very fine foreign musicians whom I periodically see in subways.

The real, front-guard music culture is, as always, going on in small clubs with cheap covers attracting audiences in the dozens.

[mr waggish]

Ezra Klein has a reasonable take on the matter.