We've had considerable discussion about "the death" of CM (or rather of public engagement with CM) in this country. I must say the story of Joshua Bell's subway performance is the most discouraging indication of all. [Closely followed, I would say, by the composer John Adams' observation that he is friendly with all of his neighbors in SF, but not one of them has any interest in, or for that matter even knows, what he does professionally.] What strikes me as most discouraging is NOT that the Metro commuters failed to notice that the busker was the famous violinist Joshua Bell. That is just a matter of the celebrity culture crap. No, the saddest part is that only 0.6% of them stopped for even a minute to listen to an expert performance of the Bach Chaconne in D minor, one of the Himalayan pinnacles of serious music. I have a nagging feeling that it would have been different elsewhere, but I am not sure. A friend of mine used to play the violin in the Georges V stop of the Paris Metro. He did all right, even though he is no Joshua Bell, and did not play pieces like Bach's towering Chaconne. However, I recollect one other experience in Paris which is, in a way, comparable to Bell's experiment, and with a very different outcome. One evening around 20 years ago, I was wandering through the Quartier Latin and was, along with many others, enthralled by a street musician. On a synthesizer of some kind, he was playing music that was a haunting, Breton folkish/jazz fusion; he sounded something like the folk group Malicorne (if you know them) and all I can say is that he was really good. A crowd gathered to listen to him, soon becoming so large that traffic at the intersection was blocked. The resulting traffic jam was such that eventually policemen arrived and asked the street musician to move elsewhere so that the crowd would disperse. It wasn't at rush-hour, to be sure. But the fraction of passersby who stopped to listen to the mysterious street musician must have been closer to 10% than 0.6%. Cheers//// Jon Gallant and Dr. Phage Department of Gnome Sciences *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html