Stop & Listen

I recently rediscovered this story.

One morning in a Washington DC train station, a man took out a violin and started to play. For 45 minutes he played six Bach pieces. During that time it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

6 people stopped to listen. About 20 gave him money, in total he collected $32. He finished playing.

Unknownst to most of the people that passed by that morning, the violinist standing against the wall at the top of the escalators was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the modern world. He played some of the most intricate music ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days before, he sold out a theatre in Boston at $100 a seat.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the train station was part of an experiment organised by reporter Gene Weingarten for a story about perception and context. The resulting article appeared in the Washington Post, April 2007 to a massive international response.

Watch what happened: