It’s astonishing and frightening how completely people can tune out what’s going on around them and become selectively oblivious. A while ago, the Washington Post conducted a clever and slightly wacky experiment, and had Joshua Bell, the world-famous virtuoso violinist, pose as a street musician in the Washington D.C. subway. The article is well worth reading.
What’s disturbing is how completely it confirms the adage that we see (or hear!) exactly what we expect. It takes a lot of deviation from normality to jar us out of autopilot.
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Hi Michael! Found your bloggy thought facebook and I’m checking out some of your thoughts.
This article sort of cracks me up. There are two reasons for this: 1. the obvious conclusion for me is that music education in the States sucks. Very few people recognized the quality, BUT, those who really stopped had significant music education (or were highly curious children about this crazy thing they were seeing in the subway - it’s normal for children to do that no matter who is playing music). 2. The journalist spends a lot of time convincing the reader about how IMPORTANT Joshua Bell is as a person ($100 tickets, wealthy, white, straight, sexy, child prodigy, etc), but not how important his music is. It makes me seriously wonder about what our values as a society truly are.
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