On 10 Apr 2007 at 8:44, Randolph Peters wrote: > Darcy James Argue wrote: > >[snip] Josh Bell is talented, of course, but I've walked by *lots* of > >very talented buskers without a moment's pause. [snip] > > >Galen Brown has a good piece on this on S21 -- "Why the Joshua Bell > >Experiment Tells Us Nothing": http://www.sequenza21.com/forum/?p=36 > > Most of us fail to "stop and smell the roses" often enough. > Deconstructing the experiment, as Galen Brown does quite well, > doesn't really alter the point of the Weingarten's object lesson.
I mined Galen Brown's post for the links to other blogs, and was pretty disturbed by what I saw. Sure, I'd already seen the kind of know-nothing reaction it was getting on political blogs (DailyKos.com, Atrios.Blogspot.com, WashingtonMonthly.com), but on musical and academic blogs I'd expected a bit more sensitivity to the actual issues. I don't know where Freakonomics.com falls on that spectrum, but I found comment 16 disturbing: from http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2007/04/09/what-happens-when-a- maestro-plays-the-subway/#comment-86483 no one expects a world-famous musician to play on a subway, and its rational for most to ignore him. Bottom line, itÂ’s unfair to say that the reaction to Bell is solely the result of a culturally ignorant and overworked population. So many people have made points about the relative capabilities of musicians, that most people can't tell the difference between the greatest musicians and the garden-variety talented student. THAT'S NOT THE POINT! Even the performance of the garden-variety talented (and charismatic) student is likely to be something worth listening to. The fact that Bell is famous wasn't really the issue -- it's that what he was playing was great music at the highest level of performance, and people ignored it. They all had their reasons, but it went unacknowledged, nonetheless. And, of course, this was one of the many good points of the article, that people don't actually appreciate artistic expression on its own *merits*, but determine what they should think by the context in which they experience it (did everyone miss the point of the excursion into Kant, et al.?). I am dismayed by how many aspects of this long and complex article are being misunderstood by all the audiences reading it, including the professional musicians! -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
