Klarinet Archive - Posting 000031.txt from 2009/08

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Is it the player or is it the package??
Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:22:24 -0400

The packaging of a musician.

Origins: Many a marketing survey has been conducted to gauge how
presentation affects consumer perceptions of quality, and quite a few such
surveys have found that people will frequently designate one of two
identical items as being distinctly better than the other simply because it
is packaged
or presented more attractively. Might this same concept apply to fields
outside of consumer products, such as the arts? Would, for example, people
distinguish between a world-class instrumental virtuoso and an ordinary
street musician if the only difference between them were the setting? These
were questions tackled by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten in 2007
when he enlisted renowned violinist Joshua Bell, a winner of the Avery
Fisher Prize for outstanding achievement in classical music who regularly
undertakes over 200 international engagements a year, to spend part of a
morning playing incognito at the entrance to a Washington Metro station
during a morning rush hour. Weingarten set up the event "as an experiment in
context, perception and priorities - as well as an unblinking assessment of
public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty
transcend?"

So, on 12 January 2007, morning commuters passing through the L'Enfant Plaza
Station of the subway line in Washington, D.C. were, without publicity,
treated to a free mini-concert performed by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, who
played for approximately 45 minutes, performing six classical pieces during
that span on his handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin (for which Bell
reportedly paid $3.5 million). As Weingarten described the crux of the
experiment:

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any
urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape:
Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and
irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on
your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does
your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you
have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the
moment?
Three days earlier, Bell had played to a full house at Boston's Symphony
Hall, where fairly good seats went for $100. But on this day he collected
just $32.17 for his efforts, contributed by a mere 27 of 1,097 passing
travelers. Only seven people stopped to listen, and just one of them
recognized the performer.

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer in the feature writing category for Gene
Weingarten's April 2007 story about this experiment.

Last updated: 6 January 2009

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/bell.asp

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