Myth: street audiences are dumb

This is part of a series taken from research conducted for my upcoming book. Writing is my happy place. If you like what you read, subscribe!

Also, if you missed the first email in this series, it's titled "How Buskers Made the Blues", and tracks how all the early blues performers were street performers.

Perhaps the most insidious myth about street performance—or at least the one that is the most widely believed—is that we, the audience, are stupid.

There are two main forms of this argument:

Readers of this email will know, of course, that this argument is bullshit. We don't get dumb just because we've left the house. In fact, studies show that audiences have just as nuanced an evaluation of outdoor performances as indoor ones. Anyone who has spent any time watching buskers will know that the most talented performers tend to get the best crowd response—and the biggest tips. And that should be the end of it.

And yet, "people are dumb" is exactly the message in Pearls Before Breakfast, an article published in The Washington Post in 2007. You may have heard of it before:

A famous classical violinist played a $3.5 million Stradivarius in the subway. 1,097 people walked passed, but very few tipped and even fewer stood to watch. Joshua Bell, widely recognised as one of the USA's finest classical musicians, a man that frequently sells out concert halls for hundreds of dollars a ticket, earned just $32 in tips in forty three minutes.

The article was an immediate hit. It won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, the highest honour in print media. It was the topic of discussion on all the classical music forums when it came out. It was featured by publications all over the world. Anecdotally speaking, I've asked dozens of people about it, and most have heard the story. Pretty impressive for what is essentially a culture piece in a newspaper printed sixteen years ago (like I said, this is the most popular piece of writing ever about busking, which is why I've spent so long analysing it).

Also, everyone I’ve asked has come to the same conclusion: that the experiment showed we—us dummies—are unable to appreciate beauty out of context.

What follows, then, is a deep dive into the way the experiment was set up and its many obvious flaws.

The image above is from the time-lapse that the Post uploaded to YouTube (it's incredibly pixelated because 360p resolution only came out on YouTube in 2008, the following year). At the beginning of his set, Bell is standing with his back to a wall, his violin case close to his feet, in front of what looks like enough empty space for a decent crowd to form.

The time-lapse shows a different story. The arcade connected a shopping mall, commercial buildings, the subway and the great outdoors, making it a tangled crisscross of invisible paths tracked by people on their well-practiced morning commutes. They turn corners without looking and move with the kind of unthinking uniformity that comes from the perpetual repetition of a daily regimen—everybody clearly knows where to go, how to get there and how not to bump into others along the way.

There's only a single spot in the entire space where someone could stand without getting in the way of passersby: against a wall facing Bell. The reporters were well aware of this—it's why one of them was holding that spot, out of the way, for the majority of the show.

I've highlighted the reporter here:

Space wasn't the only problem. The entire experiment seems intentionally designed to prevent a crowd from forming. It started at 7:51 a.m., just twenty four minutes after sunrise. These were not people with leisure time on their hands. Bell was performing to mid-level bureaucrats in Washington D.C., America's seat of power, important people with stressful jobs who'd woken up and left the house when it was still dark outside.

Furthermore, Gene Weingarten, the article's author, wanted the experiment to focus solely on the music. So, he asked Bell not to be eye-catching. Bell wore drab clothing, a baseball cap low over his eyes and didn't make eye contact with his audience. He sometimes stood on tiptoes when playing high notes, or swayed slightly. The article describes this as “acrobatic enthusiasm”. I'd call it "entirely missable to a passing audience".

For the experiment to make any sense at all, you have to believe the music was objectively beautiful. It's why Weingarten uses the word 'beauty' eleven times in the piece. "Would beauty transcend?" he asks. "Do you have time for beauty?"

He interviewed several people trying to deduce how it is possible—given the obvious beauty of the performance—that a crowd failed to materialise. The British author of a book titled Timeless Beauty: in the Arts and Everyday Life suggested that passersby probably did recognise its beauty, but walked on regardless. To him, the experiment clearly demonstrated people have "the wrong priorities". Beauty, he said, "was irrelevant to them".

A senior curator at the National Gallery was more forgiving. He said that even masterpiece paintings would be ignored if hung in a diner. A Kantian scholar said that Kant thought "viewing conditions must be optimal" to appreciate beauty. In other words, Weingarten explained, "We shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters."

But, none of the aforementioned interviewees (and notice that none are musicologists) should have been so quick to believe that the music was even good, let alone beautiful.

Let’s start with the violin. The article discusses Bell’s $3.5 million instrument for seven paragraphs, saying that “no violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s”. That may have been the prevailing view in 2007, but multiple double-blind tests have since proven that not only do audiences marginally prefer the sound of new violins, so do the violinists playing them, even in concert hall settings. Given that, it would be absurd to suggest that Bell's specific violin would have any bearing on the experience of walking through the reverberating echo-chamber where he stood.

Regardless, the instrument was irrelevant. No solo violinist could have stopped commuters at that time in the morning without accompaniment. ‘Monophonic’ music (where a single note is played at a time, with no chords or harmonies) hasn’t been popular since the Middle Ages, when it was last used in somber religious chants called ‘plainsong’. There is simply no market for solo violin.* Even when Bell went on tour in support of The Man with the Violin, a children’s book written about this very experiment, he was accompanied, everywhere he went, by a full orchestra. If Bell wouldn’t inflict solo violin on a paying audience, why should we expect the people passing through this arcade to want to listen?

Bell also intentionally avoided popular songs, under the logic that this was a test of ‘beauty’, not 'familiarity'. So, he played six lesser-known works, the longest of which was Bach’s Chaconne. Chaconne is, according to Weingarten:

Weingarten omitted that some music historians believe that Bach wrote Chaconne during a period of intense grief after returning home to find his wife dead. You can hear Bell playing that song on Spotify (on that same violin). To my ears it's not at all beautiful. Perhaps it would be best described as 'thoughtful', but only if you listen to the whole thing. Broken down into short chunks, the time passersby would have had to listen, it’s utterly indecipherable.

Perhaps we can agree that the music was, at best, 'an acquired taste'?

Which brings us to a final point about this article, two omissions so egregious their either massive oversights or outright lies…