It was 8 AM as the young man stood next to a trash bin at a train station playing a violin. Dressed in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, for the next 45 minutes he expertly played six classical pieces as 1,100 people passed him by on their way to work one morning in Washington, DC.
Of all who passed by, only six people stopped to listen for more than a moment, and they were mostly children whose parents forced them to move on. Only one man stood and listened for several minutes.
No one knew that the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro station was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on a near-priceless violin once owned by virtuoso Fritz Kreisler. Just two days before this, Bell had sold out a Boston theater at $100 a seat. That day a few folks tossed change into his violin case and kept moving.
This true story happened in 2007 as an experiment by a local newspaper. Joshua Bell, 44, is now the musical director of St. Martin In The Fields of London. He played the finest violin music by Bach, Brahms and Max Bruch on his 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius violin for which he paid nearly $4 million. And almost no one stopped to listen.
In such an ordinary setting at an inconvenient time, would you have noticed the beauty you had heard? I am ashamed to say I probably would have kept walking also.
If we do not have even a moment to hear one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written on the finest musical instrument ever made, how many other excellent things are we missing in life?
"Sing a new song. Shout and play beautiful music." (Psalm 33:3)
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