The Weingarten Subway Gambit

So Gene Weingarten has won a prize for being unhappy that Joshua Bell played the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station and no one paid any attention. I wouldn't have a problem with the piece if it simply criticized indifference to art, but Weingarten seems to want to target indifference to high art:

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls. [...]

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes. As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big. Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace." [...]

Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight. "Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

If a thousand people walked by a boombox playing the same beautiful music, that would have been unremarkable. What bothers Weingarten is that people failed to recognize a genius violinist playing "masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone." If people can't find the time to dig Schubert during their commute, that's fine, but everybody should take a minute for a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience. Right?

The problem is that telling the difference between the two requires a certain amount of familiarity with classical violin music. Not necessarily any expertise — I'm not claiming that the difference between good music and great music is only distinguishable to an expert (as seems increasingly to be the case in the visual arts). However, to distinguish Joshua Bell from a gifted amateur requires at the very least that classical music be something you occasionally enjoy. Weingarten has an image in his head of the person he wants to lecture — the sort of commuter whose human desire for aesthetic experience is satisfied by "Just Like Heaven" on his iPod — and he seems to think that Joshua Bell's performance was objectively beautiful in a way that should have transcended any Cure fan's ignorance.

Insofar as the piece isn't about DC residents' philistinism but actually about what kind of music is beautiful rather than simply satisfying, I'm unconvinced. I wouldn't want to claim that all music is beautiful as well as satisfying, but it's a bigger category than just classical.

Party boss TC offered an interesting distinction between high art and low art last week: all music is erotic, but in rock music the erotic element actually looks like sexual desire (those scandalous rhythms!) whereas in classical the sexual element is entirely sublimated. It's an interesting comparison that can take you places, but something I heard someone (Eve, maybe?) say a few months ago trumps it: "Rock and roll is sublimated eros, but so is sex!"

As for intellectual stimulation, even a casual fan of country music has considered the moral ins and outs of adultery in a way that lots of intellectually serious people haven't. Any given country song will be simple, but the genre taken as a whole is not. (I've heard the argument that most listeners are oblivious to the complexity of the "cheatin' song" and that I only notice it because I'm the sort of person who notices it in everything, but I think the amount of self-reference in the genre argues against that.)

Lastly, if Weingarten thinks that classic rock is the closest thing pop music has to classical, he has been misinformed.