The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  And that’s that.

  Except it isn’t. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell’s bow first touched the strings.

  WHITE GUY, KHAKIS, leather jacket, briefcase. Early thirties. 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—one minute and fifteen 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.

  It’s not that he has nothing else to do. He’s a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: “You review the past month’s expenditures,” he says, “forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing.”

  On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cell phone—he’s three minutes early for work—then settles against a wall to listen.

  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.

  As it happens, he’s arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of the 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.

  Mortensen doesn’t know about major or minor keys: “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. He stays his allotted three minutes as ninety-four more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, 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.

  THERE ARE SIX moments in the video that Bell finds particularly painful to relive: “The awkward times,” he calls them. It’s what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn’t noticed him playing don’t notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord—the embarrassed musician’s equivalent of, “Er, okay, moving right along…”—and begins the next piece.

  After the Chaconne, it is Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet “Ave Maria” is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: “I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion.” This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

  A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She’s got his hand.

  “I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an eight-thirty training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”

  Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is three.

  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 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.

  “Evan is very smart!”

  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.

  IF THERE WAS one person on that day who was too busy to pay attention to the violinist, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn’t hurrying to get to work. He was at work.

  The glass doors through which most people exit the L’Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his forties, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he’s supposed to be hopping, and he was.

  But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he’d lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

  “You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional,” Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

  “Most people, they play music; they don’t feel it,” Tindley says. “Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound.”

  A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire forty-three minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

  J. T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day—ten of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn’t recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship’s band was playing in Titanic, before the iceberg.

  “I didn’t think nothing of it,” Tillman says, “just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.”

  Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto. When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

  “Is he ever going to play around here again?”

  “Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”

  “Damn.”

  Tillman didn’t win the lottery, either.

  BELL ENDS “AVE Maria” to another thunderous silence, plays Manuel Ponce’s sentimental “Estrellita,” then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It’s got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Ver
sailles ball, or—in a lute, fiddle, and fife version—the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

  Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he’s not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”

  He is. You don’t need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there’s a guy there, playing a violin that’s throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell’s bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

  Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don’t take visible note of the musician, you don’t have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you’re not complicit in a rip-off.

  It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cell phones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.

  Calvin Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right, and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

  “Where was he, in relation to me?”

  “About four feet away.”

  “Oh.”

  There’s nothing wrong with Myint’s hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

  For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

  The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was “Just Like Heaven,” by the British rock band the Cure. It’s a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It’s about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can’t express the depth of his feeling for her until she’s gone. It’s about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of your eyes.

  “YES, I SAW the violinist,” Jackie Hessian says, “but nothing about him struck me as much of anything.”

  You couldn’t tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn’t noticing the music at all.

  “I really didn’t hear that much,” she said. “I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially.”

  What do you do, Jackie?

  “I’m a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract.”

  THE BEST SEATS in the house were upholstered. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you’d get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes.

  Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: “My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined.”

  Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he’s got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the violinist was too loud, and Holmes tried to calm her down.

  Edna Souza is from Brazil. She’s been shining shoes at L’Enfant Plaza for six years, and she’s had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can’t hear her customers, and that’s bad for business. So she fights.

  Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. 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.”

  Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. “If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here.”

  Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: “Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

  “People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?”

  What is this life if, full of care,

  We have no time to stand and stare.

  —From “Leisure,” by W. H. Davies

  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.

  Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of Koyaanisqatsi, the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L’Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

  Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word. It means “life out of balance.”

  In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said—not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them. “This is about having the wrong priorities,” Lane said.

  If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that—then what else are we missing?

  That’s what the Welsh poet W. H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

  Of course, Davies had an advantage—an advantage of perception. He wasn’t a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

  THE CULTURAL HERO of the day arrived at L’Enfant Plaza pretty late, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head. Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of the Chaconne. In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arc
ade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

  Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than forty people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

  “There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza.”

  Haven’t you seen musicians there before?

  “Not like this one.”

  What do you mean?

  “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?

  “Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”

  Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn’t recognize him; he hadn’t seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

  “Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn’t registering. That was baffling to me.”

  When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at eighteen, when he decided he’d never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He’s a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn’t play the violin much anymore.