The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. The book I previously gushed over won the fiction prize. A Pakistan-born photojournalist named Adrees Latif of Reuters won for his picture of a journalist shot and killed by the military in Myanmar. What moved me deeply however, was reading the article that won the “Feature Writing” award. I need to provide some background before we get into that.
Normally I wouldn’t blog about a story that was one year old and has no explicit desi angle. Many of you probably already read it. However, there is something universal about the…incident…chronicled in this article. One of the things I have come to appreciate about a blogging community like SM is that we (bloggers and commenters) get to share our appreciation (or criticism) of art with each other. Whether it is via the comment section of a book review or in the form of a heads-up about some upcoming event, blogs make great forums to share thoughts which may be incongruous with the rest of our days. Regardless of why you visit SM in particular, I think the bloggers here feel pretty honored that you would “waste” part of your day on our site, reading what we produce (even if you know you could do much better). Just this morning I was visiting Unclutterer to figure out how to waste less time during the day and to streamline my chaotic life. Sitting here typing this now (instead of packing for a business trip tomorrow) I’ve changed my mind. We should stop and waste time during the day if it so moves us.
And that brings me to the year old article from the Washington Post that won a Pulitzer today. You can’t read it yet, however. First you have to play this audio file. Once you start listening to it you can move on to the next line.
It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?… [Link]
<
p>Writer Gene Weingarten helped orchestrate a brilliant “stunt” on commuters passing through L’Enfant Plaza last January in order to take a stab at settling the debate above. He took one of the most gifted violin players in the world, dressed him up as a humble busker in jeans, and asked him to play his 3.5 million dollar violin on the metro platform. Who would recognize brilliance? Who would even stop?
<
p>
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend? [Link]
All of us hope that beauty will transcend. Shoot, sometimes I will write something at 3 a.m. in the hopes that just one person will get it 
. If transcendence isn’t a probable outcome somewhere, then all our lives are somehow cheapened and we all know it. We count on others to make up for our mundane. But on that platform on that day only 7 people recognized the beauty reverberating all around them.
White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He’s heading up the escalator. It’s a long ride — 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don’t walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn’t race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark…Mortensen doesn’t know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there’s something about what he’s hearing that he really likes…
<
p>As it happens, he’s arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of “Chaconne.” (“It’s the point,” Bell says, “where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There’s a religious, exalted feeling to it.”) The violinist’s bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big. [Link]
See, Weingarten’s article isn’t about who has the best ear or eye for art or who is the best critic. What he’s trying to really figure out is who (what kind of person) will stop. Who will break out of their drone-like lives to appreciate something out-of-place and time because it so obviously cuts through both?:
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He’s the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.
“There was a musician,” Parker [Evan’s mom] says, “and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.”
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs…<
p>The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away. [Link]
<
p>That last line is probably the most depressing line I’ve read in a long time. Its enough to send even a young 25-year-old into a midlife crisis. In order to get the kid to school and herself to work, the mom unknowingly rushes him past brilliance. Scoot.
<
p>I also got to thinking about the cross-cultural implications of this experiment. What if, instead of Joshua Bell playing the violin it was the young Lata Mangeshkar that was singing at that same metro stop? When I was a kid and watched Bollywood movies with my mom I was shocked to learn that most of the actresses didn’t really sing the songs. They were all dubbed and my mom told me that Lata Mangeshkar was the voice behind many of them. What if, in her prime, she started singing at L’Enfant Plaza. Would her voice be recognized as beautiful or just dissonance?
Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?
We’re busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth. [Link]
<
p>The most poignant story of that day was that of John Picarello, “a smallish man with a baldish head.” I won’t even quote him because its too beautiful too read just an excerpt about it. The article is very long. I read it three times tonight. I listened to the 40 minute performance. It really is beautiful and you can hear the footsteps of commuters in the background. Don’t take my word for it though, they don’t give Pulitzers out for nothing.
And thanks for wasting your time here. We aren’t art and we sure aren’t brilliant but it still feels good to know some of you actually stop here.
Ars gratia artis, as it were.
In spite of my logical side, I do find I am drawn to some things as just being “beauty”… I don’t think there is a specific angle you can take on what it is, and I certainly don’t think beauty is relegated to any particular culture. I do think that different people can have different takes on beauty based on who they are as a person and how they developed.
And what if he was playing at the entrance to Logan airport one September morning? Would history have taken a detour? I want to believe so.
Thanks for the post Abhi.
Wonderful article Abhi.
Thanks, Abhi, for this piece and the links to the WaPo articles. I hadn’t seen them before.
It reminded instantly of a moment 10 years ago. I was in Venice with a girlfriend in late November, when the sky becomes dark blue very early in the evening as darkness settles in. We were walking through the alleyways and corridors in search of an early meal and came out onto a small piazza. It was entirely empty, except in one corner there were two students — one plucking an upright bass and the other playing a saxophone. I don’ know what they were playing, or if they were practicing or performing, but I recall two things in particular now: the way the music echoed off the building walls in the chilled air, and that I’d never heard that combination of music and environment and aesthetic before. I convinced my girlfriend to stay for 30 minutes, even though we were hungry. The music has remained longer than that relationship did. Wonderful.
I just wasted 45 minutes here; beautiful. Nice once, Abhi.
I’ve been mostly lurking and sometimes posting for several…wow, years, now. In some measure, SM, has kept me connected with a lot of things, and some of them are desi. Thanks, Abhi and everyone, for wasting your time on us.
Abhi: Once in a while you come up with a jem like this, don’t you. Speaking of Lata Mangeshkar have you heard about this thirteen year old girl from Ahmedabad called Aishwarya Majumdar trained by Purushhotam Upadhyaya, one of the Gujarati Sugam Sangeet stalwart. She just won National award in a contest called “Chhote Ustad”. Her rendition of classical, semiclassical songs are rated better than Lata herself at this early age. She has offers to sign contracts for crores (one crore is approx. $250,000) of rupees at age 13. Now what if we invite her to sing at say Smithsonian Station on the Washington Metro Line. I suspect hardly anyone would recognize her talent and pass the brilliance in a second, except may be few South Asians! Too bad we are all caught up in a rat race and we never stop along the way to smell the roses. Diamonds always come wrapped in a rag.
From a frequent passer-by who has never commented before: Thank you…
The title is great – Art without a frame!!
Listening to the audio file, the music definitely rises above the bustle. Soars, actually and after reading the article I thought it was incredible that so few people walking past felt it. But then I realised that I saw it in the frame, so to speak. I already knew what I was listening to, I was merely an instructed visitor to a museum. “The moral mathematics of the moment” – Very, very interesting. Both wonderful and depressing at the same time.
I would certainly have stopped to listen – but that’s small comfort because I’ll take any distraction when I’m dragging myself reluctantly to work, like Calvin on his school bus.
Thanks Abhi, for the links. After all, what do they of desis know that only desis know? 🙂
Everywhere, we seek to control our intake of art – the times, the venues, the seats, the artists. In America, we succeed brilliantly, for sure too brilliantly – scripting art into our lives when convenient. The result, is this. We can’t tell true beauty if we didn’t script its appearance.
Daler Mehndi is the world’s greatest artist. Ever.
Thanks for sharing this Abhi. Simply beautiful.
Beautiful post. Thank you.
abhi, that was a terrific post. i was completely engaged while reading it.
Well, to write this good, about something that was so brilliant, is art. Thanks for the wonderful post
Great Write Abhi.
When I first saw Gene’s feature article in WP Magazine, I realized it was something special. Sent it around the tubes a few times.
Gene is the great writer(everyman) in all of us, even if only occasionally.
For many of us, Gene’s becoming a “made” member of the Pulitzer Family is like Jimmy Conway’s enthusiasm and hopes for Tommy’s chances in Good Fellas. Fortunately, without the bang.
Gene will, of course, be insufferable, for the next several years.
Good Write.
Take Care.
Abhi, you deserve big love for featuring this story.
It’s disappointing to realize how our culture is so focused on building wealth that the wealth around us (music, nature, kindness of strangers) goes unnoticed and unappreciated by most.
Keep raging, Abhi. We’re listening.
As a side note, Mind the Bach! Classical music is now being piped into the London underground to reduce crime and to soothe nerves.
I saw this a while back on the washigton post site. It was so moving…I loved it, and forwarded it to everyone I knew.
I saw this interesting video on youtube few days back. They asked a few musicians/critics to listen to 4 violins, and asked then to identify the Strad. Guess what, they couldn’t. They picked another violin as the ‘best sounding’. Makes me wonder, maybe art is great only if it is also appreciated without the frame.
On the subject of the Washington Post, did any of you happen to catch the roti dust-up on the “what’s cooking” chat and mighty appetite blog, where the Post writer said that of all the ethnicities she’s written about Indians are the only ones that complain, which she doesn’t understand as she thinks Indians should be happy she writes about them at all?!
Sorry for my recent silence; my hands are not doing so well, but I hope to return to the Mutiny shortly! We discussed this article last year in my arts & culture journalism class when it came out, and it was a terrific discussion. Gene Weingarten writes (or wrote, the last time I was in DC) a humor column for the WaPo. This makes me wish he wrote features more often!
Thank You for the post.
A friend passed this on to me when it first came out. What a fantastic experiment! My view of music, artists, grassroots performance, and even of random clips of musicians on YouTube…it’s all been changed thanks to this. How vindicating it is to hear that this won the Pulitzer–so, so awesome.
And as a classical violinist myself, I’m still stunned that only one or two people actually recognized him, of the hundreds that passed him by. But I guess it goes to show what a small, niche audience classical music and other similar art/music/performance styles have come to have…what a shame. Like Abhi said, this same experiment could have been conducted with any true musical talent who’s out of the popular eye, and probably would’ve gotten the same result.
Thank you for this reminder.
Skp– I recently got in a huuge argument with a friend about this. But out of curiosity, why is it a shame that the classical music audience has dwindled? Surely other forms have taken its place. So why do so many people lament classical music moving out and into a niche?
I’m with skp, I found it painful to watch Joshua Bell’s talent and the Bach Chaconne get completely ignored.
For the same reason that it would be a shame to see fewer people using our libraries and parks, going to visit our monuments and historic sites.
One more thing: Have you seen Shawshank Redemption? There is a scene that is one of the most poignant,sublime moments in the film, it’s when Tim Robbins character sets up the record player in the window overlooking the prison yard and plays the Letter Duet from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It somehow explains the music’s significance and affect.
Bess–thank you. I couldn’t have put it better myself. 🙂 I love that scene in Shawshank (one of my favorite movies), as well as Andy’s dialogue about how he still had the music with him, in his mind and heart, even when he was locked up in solitary.
Shehan–I think the real reason is because it’s existed for centuries, and it was a dominant form of music in the western world until relatively recently, and it embodies so much culture and history and sheer emotion and beauty. I can listen to Beethoven piano sonatas from over 100 years ago and still be moved to tears; not many other genres can claim that. It’s not like the genre’s dead, but with educational budget cuts and schools losing their music and art programs, and with people increasingly seeing it as inaccessible and “hard to understand”, and even with digital music sharing and swapping lossy mp3s around instead of high-quality CD recordings, it’s being hit hard on all sides. Smaller professional orchestras are suffering and having to shut down, too. I really worry about the state of affairs 50 years from now.
All:
Here are Dave Barry thoughts:
[http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2008/04/gene-weingarten.html Link]
Thought you might enjoy.
Sorry. Won’t attempt that again.
Those who want to read it can get there, I think.
27 · bess said
Ah, classical music is great, but this is the prison experience that will forever stay with me.
27 · bess said
Seen it? Oh yeah.
Yeow! I was going for transcendent not transvestite.
Thanks, Abhi, for the throwback to the archives – that happened before I discovered your brilliance. And I must admit that when I first saw the photo I thought it was a post about some Aamir Khan epic. He’d get passed around too.
great post, thx
Even when I first read it, I wondered why Gene decided to have Bell play in the morning, when everyone is rushed, rather than the evening. I still think that’s a great flaw in the article. People would be better able to make an independent decision based on their own preferences if they weren’t rushing to a commitment, but were rushing to get home/make dinner/etc. Then you get to see if people would pick their own mundane routine over brilliance, rather than their job being the variable.
I don’t think that I have ever read any other article – be it in a blog, newspaper, or magazine – that I just did not want to end. Thanks so very much, Abhi. And please don’t call it a waste – these are the kinds of things that enrich our lives.
Different strokes for different folks, skp. Although my classical equivalent would be Dvorak, I could also say the same of a qawwali by NFAK. Others might choose different genres in the arts. I don’t think it means that classical music is necessarily more worthy of our attention and encouragement than other dwindling arts or practises, as bess pointed out.
And since you asked, I would have stopped. When I see artists on the street or subway, I feel it’s a shame not to congratulate their talent. And as a small thank you for making my day just a little brighter. The other day I heard a lovely saxophone version of the Beatles’ Yesterday, one of my favourite songs – I passed up three trains (and some money, of course) to stay and listen – completely worth it.
If you’ve read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, you’ll find that some of the questions raised in the article have been explored before and answered (to some extent). For example, Gladwell talks about split-second decisions and points out that an expert in a particular field will usually get it right. This is validated in this instance by the fact that most of those who spotted Bell were those with some exposure to classical music.
Separately, I wonder if the experiment would’ve had a better outcome if he’d sung popular music. Or maybe that would’ve been too easy!
I also wonder if the kid thing is a red herring, given that children are interested in and distracted by sooo many things!
All this doesn’t, of course, detract from the wonderful writing.
Are so many “desi”s in America so thoroughly Ira-Glass vulgar? I am not surprised that a tabloid escapade of a slumming celebrity gets a Pulitzer–after all it involves legit music. Nothing more incontrovertibly respectable than baroque sounds out of an antique fiddle. (In place of “incontrovertibly respectable”, one may substitute “transcendentally beautiful”.) You have got to admire the writer here. I stopped reading right after getting kicked in the head with the phrase “snazzy, sequined idea”, but I read enough of the interminable, redundant–hence deathless–prose to get its primary appeal: which is to inspire, in every genteel middle-class shitass’s mind, the frightening question:
WOULD I HAVE STOPPED?
For the day you walk past such a stunt, my friend, is the day your shit begins to stink that a lifetime of odor control won’t fix.
Heaven forbid getting caught on camera …
We salute the genius who can think up such a hooky concept for the highly-educated middle class. But let’s not forget the other appealing things about this fugly-ass pile of prose about “beauty”. Length, for one. Nothing says serious like a painfully long piece, especially when strewn with gross thesaurus-words. Upwardly mobile Americans are like deer in its headlights–it never fails. Then there’s all the proles not giving a shit, and that too at a public transit stop. This must make a class-anxious prestige-hungry member of the Ira Glass crowd giddy with joy. (And in place of “giddy with joy”, one may substitute “gasp with dismay”–the buzz of superiority takes so many forms.)
God, what’s happening?
It begins to seem that desis are merely immigrants, nothing but proles. Or why would their children show all the classic signs of the newly-middle class?
Thanks to this post, I caught another gem, obviously from deep down in the “reflection, epiphany, and self-congratulatory conclusion” section of the piece:
Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty.
“Kant” … “let’s say we can’t judge” …
This is a fucking masterpiece of vulgarity.
Lata–look, we are talking here about prohibitively expensive all-European music, a clear class marker and completely disconnected from the massive mainstream of America (which, needless to say, is African in every gene). Lata was never anything like that. Only if you thought that there was a culture out there, somewhere in–where else!–Europe, where Bach was popular, unremarkable, regular diet, would you imagine comparing these two “foreign” sources of “musical beauty”. Lata is beautiful, but Indians aren’t white; it wouldn’t enter our heads to talk about her voice as “universally” beautiful, “transcending” all cultural learning. We have our own messed up ways of unstinking our shit. But dissonant, hell no. For one, she has an untold number of songs plumb bang in the major scale, even pentatonic. Besides, I have seen how audiences of a thoroughgoing meat-and-potatoes “blues” mindset react to Indian scales–they shut up and listen. They feel like listening, without being forced into an expensive cramped seat and browbeaten into “reverence” by snooty symphony-center androids.
Up next: people blindsided on camera with SPELLINGS. Will orthography transcend, and what has Kant said about it? Panicked NPR listeners vote in a Pulitzer.