Actually the average quality of art is worse than it has been since caveman times because the “arts” have degenerated into an exercise in nepotism and advertising. People from rich families go to music school, have every advantage and then get a high-paying job playing badly in a symphony. Pop “artists” are more likely to be well-advertised than to have any actual musical merit. Most of the people who are supposedly professionals actually play and sing badly out of tune (but not so badly out of tune that the person who wrote this article or most of the people making most of the money can tell). There are musicians who get it, but the vast majority of the ones getting paid do not. They are earnest but utterly lacking in talent. And the writer of this article is correct when he says that most cannot tell the difference between good and great but he’s wrong when he says that most can tell the difference between excruciatingly bad and great.

getting the greatest numbers of listeners.most attention, smiles, music majors and beautiful women hanging around (all at the same time ) are:

Vivaldi’s Spring first mvt. (with a lot of double stops)

The Godfather Theme

Pacabel Canon in D

Brahm’s Hungarian Rhapsody #5

Theme from Cats

Fiddler on the Roof selections

Mozart’s Turkish Rondo ( again, lots of double stops)

Result: much more excitement than Bach in a subway in front of Wall Streeters!

Chance Encounter is a 30-40 minute site-specific musical work to be performed in public spaces and street corners by composer/vocalist Lisa Bielawa, and performed by Grammy-award winning soprano Susan Narucki and Brooklyn-based ensemble The Knights. On Friday, September 28th at the Seward Park Public Library in downtown NYC, Chance Encounter will be staged to integrate common urban elements such as taxicabs, subway stairs, and store entrances; Bielawa\’s work moves through public spaces, alternating amongst musicians. Lisa & Susan have spent the past year collecting hundreds of utterances made in public- from the airport in Anchorage, Alaska to kids playing in Central Park— and are in the process of creating free-form arias and songs that animate the particular mood of each collective topic. Chance Encounter is made possible in part with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Creative Capital.
To learn more about Lisa’s ongoing research and chance encounters with the public each and everyday, visit her Chance Encounter blog at http://www.lisabielawa.net/chance_section
To learn more about the project in general, visit http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_837.html

Of course, if (and I have found this to be the case once in a while) I hear someone playing on the street and do not like that person’s playing (lack of talent or lack of taste being the big reasons), I would not stop and listen and would not give that person any money.

The Washington Post experiment was an empty one for me too, but I’m sure that it will do wonders for the sales of Joshua Bell’s new recording.

The truth is, people that are talented collect in New York City because they may be able to get an opportunity at a larger career than they would in a small city like Dayton. So the intensity of the competition is very high. The best violinist in Dayton is not comparable to the best violinists in New York City.

Obviously, Joshua Bell is a virtuoso, and has spent years getting to where he is today. I’m sure that at the level he plays at, that he is considerably better than the typical street violinist in New York City. However, I can tell you that most people’s ears aren’t that good and probably couldn’t hear the difference between the performances.

A lot of people don’t understand Scarlatti, and he wrote 350 years ago, and those people probably couldn’t tell the difference between an inspired performance of Scarlatti and a below average one.

What the experiment shows to me is this: Someone in the classical community, maybe Bell himself, wants to know how Bell stacks up with the plebians. That to me is a good thing, because it shows that the classical community is considering the fact that the plebians might be on to something.

I’m a democrat at heart; I believe that the audience has a right to enjoy themselves. If they enjoy themselves at the Knitting Factory… then great. If they want to hear the old warhorses, then great. If they want avant-garde, then great. As New York City itself shows, you may not reach a huge audience, but just about any kind of art will get played and consumed by a small group of people.

Joshua Bell just happens to reach a very wide audience comparably, and he does it because of factors that range from his own resources to his playing ability.