Two Violinists Take to Subway Busking

I loved this profile in the New York Times' online edition. Henrique Prince is a self-taught violinist who jams in the Times Square subway station with his own bluegrass band. This is so New York to me: the chaos of the streets punctuated by the unexpected person making human connections. It may be what I love most about this city. As I've returned here after years of being away, I've been struck with what a prominent role music plays in the lives of people here, in a much more professional, academic way than the rest of the country enjoys it. This photo essay demonstrates this perfectly. In an effort to acknowledge this fact, I always let my children give money to subway buskers. They love this tradition and I know it helps them acknowledge how many people give their lives to their art form.

The profile also reminded me of the fabulous experiment conducted by Joshua Bell in April, 2007, reported in the Washington Post. Bell, a world-reknown solo violinist, dressed in jeans and a cap and annonymously played during rush hour in the L'Enfant Plaza station of the D.C. metro. The experiment was to see how many commuters would stop to hear the professional's music, or at least how many would pause in some subconsious recognition of exceptional skill. The official video of the experiment has been watched on YouTube by over a million viewers. That half a dozen people stopped out of the hundreds that passed by shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this country's abysmal recognition of classical skill, but I was amused recently to see that portions of the Post's article have shown up in a email chain. The "isn't this terrible this happened?" tone of the email underscores the irony of the whole experiment: in theory, we believe classical traditions and skills are important to our culture but when those skills are put right under our noses, we still don't recognize them. It is terrible, but without the trappings of the concert hall and pricey tickets most of us would have probably walked right by Joshua Bell ourselves, although I like to think my kids would have given him a few bucks.