Gene Weingarten's "Pearls Before Breakfast": A Handy Guide to My Outrage

Although in class I was unable to summarize my feelings of rage towards this article, in speaking with Stefanie afterwards while waiting to talk to Nora I came up with this: because the authors of the study were so worried that they were going to create some sort of mob scene, they limited the parameters in such a way as to all but guarantee the result. This isn't research, imho -- it's stacking the deck. Here is the list of things I wrote out after finishing reading it:

Time of day: ensured that most people would be on their way to work, and less likely or able to stop to listen even if they'd wanted to

Location: somewhat remote Metro stop ensured that most people would be passing through on their way to somewhere else, less likely to loiter

Choice of music: while Bell may be extraordinary musician, classical music is not a particularly popular style of music in 21st century

Culture: the appeal of classical music can be seen as largely cultural, further limiting the number of passersby who might be interested

Class: additionally, the appeal of classical music is also class-based to the extent that attending the opera or symphony can be incredibly expensive

Song selection: by not choosing recognizable selections, they were making it less likely that a crowd would gather and listen together

Children: of course the children were interested -- anything out of the ordinary on an otherwise dull commute would be a welcome diversion

Busking: there is a distinct difference between a musician performing for performance sake & one who is playing in order to get paid by passersby

I could probably write a paragraph about each point, but I think you get my drift. I found a very interesting graph, for instance, which shows that last year classical music albums sold approximately 10 million copies compared to 105 million for rock, 55 million for R&B, 55 million for alternative, 42 million for country and on down the line. The only genre that sold less than classical was new age. From my rough estimate, there are 400 million albums reflected in the graph, which puts classical at 2.5% of the total.

As far as I'm concerned, this rather aptly illustrates the pretty incredible bias that these so-called researchers were working under. Joshua Bell is a talented musician, so went the logic, therefore people will obviously stop to listen to him. If it were Mos Def rapping, or Bruce Springsteen singing, then most certainly yes. But your average person does not listen to classical radio stations or go to the symphony. The class bias here is incredibly obvious and, sadly, laughable.

For me, it wasn't so much a "we're obviously better than you" attitude that Larry mentioned in class, but one of "we can't understand why you're not like us." To which I would reply, "Well, duh." If someone is tuning out a street musician, for whatever reason, at the end of the day it doesn't matter how talented that musician is or how much their instrument is worth. If you don't hear something, you don't hear it -- whether it's extraordinary or downright terrible.