On 10 Apr 2007 at 17:05, Michael L. Meyer wrote: > On Apr 10, 2007, at 3:49 PM, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > > > Someone wrote (I forget who ;) > > > >> I am a person with a pretty definitive > >> schedule, and a busy one, at that. Why should it follow, then, > >> that I have no time for anything else? Or more specifically, don't > >> have time to appreciate good aesthetic experiences? Just because I > >> might have to pass by the world-famous violinist in the subway > >> because I need to get to work on time in the morning? > > > > I suppose I'm lucky that I have a job that arriving 5 minutes late > > isn't that big of a deal; and considering how many others stop and > > watch musicians in NYC's subways, I'm guessing they can be a few > > minutes late too. People take time for things they value, so if > > Washingtonians decided to ignore Joshua Bell, then oh well, that's > > their loss. > > It was me who wrote it. And you are lucky, Kim, to have a job like > that. You're definitely not the norm.
Maybe it's a NYC thing. Maybe it's a public transit thing. But I don't know anyone who has any job that's not like Raymond Horton's, where other people are waiting on them to begin some activity. And even that doesn't seem to me to be that much of an issue. Does a member of a major orchestra really arrive at rehearsal with not even 5 minutes to spare before getting ready for the baton to be raised? My surprise is the claim that time pressure was the chief reason. It would surely be the combination of needing to get somewhere within a reasonable time frame, plus not being that interested, plus not reallly paying attention (iPod listeners, for instance). I don't own an iPod. I don't think I ever will, because I don't like the idea of converting the music listening experience to such a passive activity. For me, listening to *any* kind of music is a relatively dense and intensive activity (with the exception of certain complete bubble-gum repertories), and I don't *want* to get in the habit of not actually listening actively. And the result of so much passive listening, I found in my teaching, was that people *can't* listen actively, at least not without extensive prodding and training. I encountered students who'd bring in their favorite piece and couldn't muster more than one sentence describing it before it was played for the class. This is not really an issue raised by the article, though, but one that occurs to me because of the frequent mention in blog commentary of the iPod issue. [] > My point here is that my passing by the busker doesn't mean I value > his art any less than if I had stopped. It certainly *could* mean > that, but not necessarily. And you're right, it *is* my loss, but > doesn't the fact that I do recognize it as a loss then prove that I > value it? But it seems to me that the law of averages ought to mean that out of 1,097 people there ought to be more than a few dozen who both appreciate it and are in a position to express that appreciation. What surprises me is how incredibly few those who liked it and showed it actually were. > The unscientific nature of the experiment really does end up > defeating it: a quantitative measure of "whether people stop to > listen or not" is not nearly as effective as qualitatively following > up with all those commuters afterwards, and asking for their > reasoning. I know it would be nearly impossible to do that (and I > know they did it with a few), but that's part of the point too, isn't > it? For some reason, very few of the people who passed through the station but were not interviewed have showed up anywhere in the comment threads I've read about this today, either in the online chat with the article's author or in the numerous blogs (both musical and political, where it's getting a surprising amount of comment) where it's being discussed. Where are all those other people? Maybe if we knew that, we'd have some better explanations for what happened. But I still think there's something rather specific to DC here. I can't imagine the same result in NYC (even at the Wall Street station) or San Francisco, or in Berlin or Vienna. But those are all *very* different city cultures than that of DC. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
