[Reader-list] Article from the Washington Post: an experiment in context, perception, priorities

[Gora Mohanty]

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 04:12 -0700, lalitha kamath wrote:
> 
> 
> A story ran in The Washington Post this week -- on Easter Sunday -- 
> In a nutshell, the Post convinced one of the world's greatest
> violinists to go incognito and play his fiddle at a Metro station,
> standing there with his open case like just another street musician,
> begging for money.
[...]

Thank you for sharing that. That was just a beautiful, and thought-
provoking article. Why just a musical virtuoso performing unnoticed
on a crowded platform; most of us go through life in the same way,
blind to the beauty around us. If sunset happened once in a thousand
days, what paeans of praise would be written to it?

  As for itinerant musicians on the Metro, this is a more common
thing on the Paris Metro, where it seems that they are better
appreciated. At least, I remember that there used to be this
woman who played a harp regularly at one of the stations, and
people would stop to listen, usually stand through a complete
piece, and applaud. As the article points out, perhaps it is a
matter of context, in that people are more habituated to seeing
good musicians on the Paris Metro. Or, as another quote in the
article has it, maybe life has slowly choked the poetry out of
us.

Regards,
Gora