Now that I've prepped you by thoroughly debunking the Joshua Bell Experiment in my last email, you're ready for the kicker. There's one final, delicious twist in the tale that turns the entire narrative on its increasingly bruised head.
"People can’t appreciate beauty out of context."
That's the running theme throughout Pearls Before Breakfast, an article that is ostensibly about how much environmental factors affect our ability to notice nice stuff. "A lot" is the conclusion reached by innumerable industry think pieces, blog posts, news features, magazine columns, social media feeds and forum comments opining on why Joshua Bell failed to build a crowd.
So, let's break that conclusion down into its three constituent parts:
We debunked points 2 and 3 last time. Few people, in my opinion, would use 'beautiful' to describe the music Bell performed, and as for the 'context' in which that sound was produced, it wasn't just abnormal—it was guaranteed to produce this exact result.
Except, here's the twist: Bell didn't fail! In fact, his show was a surprising success!
I don't mean financially. Bell made the equivalent of $45/hour ($70 adjusted for inflation). As no busker familiar with that pitch was interviewed in the article, we have no idea whether that was a good haul for that location. Also, the experiment was said to have failed purely because a crowd didn’t form, so let's not get distracted by money.
No, what I'm talking about is how much Bell managed to emotionally and intellectually touch the commuters passing through that space. Because if you focus on "appreciation"—rather than the utter impossibility of building a crowd under those conditions—it's frankly incredible how strongly people reacted to his music.
We can't enter the minds of people who walked by without tipping. Maybe they loved the music but had to get to work, maybe they hated it, maybe it never even entered their consciousnesses. The only voices we get to hear in the article are those of the people who left a tip or who worked nearby. And their opinions of what they saw couldn’t have been more enthusiastic.
Ask yourself this: during a street musician's 43-minute set, under the conditions outlined in my previous email, how many times would you expect them to make passersby act or think in a way that they'd never acted or thought before? How many once-in-a-lifetime experiences would a busker give people in just 43 minutes?
Because according to the interviews, Bell managed this again and again.
Two of the tippers were ex-violin students. They were what you might call 'informed listeners'. Experts, even. One said that although she didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, she did know that the man playing it had a gift. The other claimed to have studied violin seriously until he was eighteen, and only stopped when he realised he wasn't talented enough to do it professionally. He watched Bell for a full nine minutes, tipped, and later said:
This was a superb violinist. I’ve never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn’t want to be intrusive on his space. Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.
Okay, those were experts. What about the uninformed?
John Mortensen said he wasn't a classical music fan, and nor could he tell you the difference between major and minor keys. But, he'd been so impressed by what Bell was playing that he checked his phone hoping to find he had a few minutes spare. He did, so he leaned against a wall to watch. From the article:
“Whatever it was,” he says, “it made me feel at peace.” So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. When he leaves…there’s another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.
But the most impressive reaction of all was from Edna Souza, a lady who worked at the shoeshine stand right next to the pitch. She told Weingarten that buskers were bad for business, as they prevented her talking to her clients, which would, in turn, harm her tips. Thankfully for her, busking is illegal on both the Metro and mall sides of the line that divides the room.
Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she’s got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.
What about Joshua Bell?
He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police."
Although Souza could have called the cops by muscle memory alone (this was back in the days when mobile phones had physical buttons), and although she clearly states Bell was bad for business, for the first time in six years of working at that shoe shine stand she took a financial hit in order to let the busker play on.
Wow, right? One person said they'd never heard anything like it. Another watched and tipped a busker for the first time in his life. Another took a pay cut to keep listening. Was the Joshua Bell experiment a roaring victory for music, or am I going mad? Because apparently nobody thinks the same way:
But no. I'm not crazy. This article was merely a masterful piece of storytelling. In fact, Pearls Before Breakfast is an incredible example of how 'context' affects the experience of art, just not in the way that you think…
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