Stopping to listen

Do you remember the 2007 experiment in street music involving Joshua Bell? At the suggestion of The Washington Post, Bell - one of the most celebrated violinists in the world - played works by Bach and several other composers on his 18th-century Stradivarius near a D.C. Metro station for roughly 40 minutes. Dressed in sweats, and standing next to his open case, Bell resembled an ordinary street performer, and yet the sounds that greeted the morning commuters were those that had regularly filled the concert halls where Bell commanded as much as $1,000 a minute. So what happened? Well, The Post surreptitiously filmed the performance, and then analyzed it - and when they did they saw that only 7 people, out of 1,070 who passed Bell over the course of his impromptu concert, stopped for at least a minute. 27 threw some money at him, for a total of $32.

Surprising? Revealing? Both - in various ways. But perhaps the most telling detail is one cited by Jeanette Bicknell, in her new book Why Music Moves Us. Bicknell notes that of the several dozen people who paused to listen to Bell, a significant percentage were children, or teens. Why would that be? For Bicknell, the answer has to do with what you might call frames. Adults think of subway stations as mundane places of transit, and of street performers as slightly less than top-flight. Having made these classifications, they thus simply ignored Bell. But children haven't yet learned to impose such rules upon what they see, or hear - and so they could listen, rather objectively. And, when they did, they were richly rewarded. At several moments, in fact, small children, drawn in by Bell's playing, resisted as their preoccupied parents pulled at their hands.

And therein, it seems to me, lies a moral that can be applied to music and parenting alike. It's a simple one: remember to stop, to look, to see beyond the routine and convenient frame. The other day, tired after watching Cleo for much of the day, I encouraged her to play while I tried to read a magazine. But she was having none of it; she wanted to involve me. I initially resisted, and pointed her to her crayons, and easel. She tugged at my pants leg. Finally, putting the magazine down, and looking up - and listening, rather than seeing her through my simple assumption that she was merely bored - I soon learned that Cleo wanted to wrestle. Wrestle! We'd never really tried it before, but soon she had her knees on my chest, I was blowing raspberries on her belly, and we were both laughing harder than we had all day.

I'm no Joshua Bell. Far from it, friends. But, for a few minutes at least, neither was I a mere passerby, head down, oblivious to the rich music that swirled around me. Instead, I partook and received, for free, what was priceless.