Subway melodies

A number of people have linked to and commented on this Washington Post article, Pearls Before Breakfast , which describes an experiment in which world-class virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell performed in a subway station while Post reporters observed the responses of subway passengers (the passengers essentially ignored Bell.)

I disagree with the author of the Post article, and with many of the people who have comented on it, who conclude that the subway passengers' behavior shows that they are somehow intellectually, morally, and/or spiritually (i.e. esthetically) deficient because they failed to stop to listen to Bell. (The WP article's title implies they're swine.)

There was a very good reason for not stopping: namely, Bell was playing Bach, which, for most normal people, is excruciatingly, mind-numbingly dull music.

The passengers weren't ignoring Bell, they were ignoring Bach.

But shouldn't the passengers at least stop to appreciate Bell's skills? Stopping to appreciate only Bell's skills (as opposed to enjoying the music he was playing) is an intellectual exercise, not an esthetic experience; expecting people to appreciate the demonstration of technical skills used to play music they don't enjoy means expecting them to temporarily subvert their esthetic needs to satisfy an intellectual one. This is the opposite of what most normal people expect from a music listening experience, and the opposite of music's purpose and function.

Furthermore, I question whether talent is so obvious in the case of the performance of music that is not emotionally engaging: talent and skill in music ultimately serve to strengthen the melody (which is the main mechanism that carries the emotional meaning of the piece). If a melody is inherently uninspiring, how can you judge if its being played brilliantly? Since Bach’s melodies are (again, for most normal people) plodding and pedantic (for one thing all the melody notes seem to have the same duration), how can you tell if the playing -- the phrasing and dynamics – is or isn't plodding and pedantic?

(As an extreme case, consider modernistic, non-melodic "music", which delivers no emotional content (except perhaps, indirectly, annoyance); how can you identify the performer’s talent? How can you even tell if the performer misses a note, or otherwise failes to realize the piece's musical meaning, if the piece has none?)

If one really wanted to judge the public's musical esthetic taste, a more interesting, follow-up, subway experiment would be to have Bell (or even a merely competent performer) play some actual moving violin music -- for example Romantic era classical violin pieces by Pagannini or Brahms, traditional Scottish dance music, Parisian gypsy jazz, or Texas swing, to name just a few examples).

Actually, this phenomenon can be routinely observed: in my experience, street performers who play exciting, engaging music have no problems drawing big crowds. Another example of the public's preference for moving music: recently, the winner of a British talent reality show (see his performance on the widely circulated YouTube video below) won the competetion, not with any great talent, but because he sang a great song (Puccini’s Nessun Dorma).



In summary: if the public has bad musical taste (as suggested by ths article), the Bell subway experiment doesn't demonstrate it.