11C Joshua Bell, Distracted by Many Things
July 20, 2025 Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock Joanna Seibert
“As Jesus and his disciples went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.”//////
He emerges from the Metro/ at the L’Enfant Plaza Station at 7:51 a.m. and positions himself against a wall beside a trash basket in the arcade at the top of the escalators. He is a white male looking younger than his 39 years, wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a Washington Nation/als baseball cap. He takes out his 3.5 million-dollar Stradivarius violin made in 1713, opens his case at his feet,/ shrewdly tosses in a few dollars as seed money, and starts to play. It is Friday, January 12, 2007, during the Washington DC morning rush hour. For the next 43 minutes, one of the world’s leading violinists, Joshua Bell, performs six classical pieces as 1,097 people pass by L’Enfant Plaza at the nucleus of federal Washington./ Almost all are on their way to government jobs, mid-level bureaucratic positions, policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, and consultant.
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post devises this experiment to see if, at an inconvenient time, will people stop to hear the voice of the world’s most celebrated violinist. The acoustics are perfect. The arcade is a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors. The sound bounces round and round and resonates.
If you were in Little Rock in March of that year, you paid several hundred dollars to hear Bell play. Or you may have seen the movie The Red Violin, where Bell performs the violin solos in the Oscar-winning soundtrack. He also won the Avery Fisher Prize as the best classical musician in America, and in 2001, won the Grammy Award for the best instrumental soloist. He is usually paid $1,000 a minute.
Bell begins with Bach’s “Chaconne,” one of the most difficult violin pieces, celebrating the breadth of human possibility./ Three minutes go by./ Sixty-three people pass by without acknowledging Bell. Finally, a middle-aged man alters his gait for a split second,/ turns his head to notice,/ but then keeps walking./ “But Martha was distracted by her many tasks.”
A half minute later, Bell gets his first donation. A woman throws a dollar in the case but keeps walking. It is not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stops, stands against a wall, and listens. In the forty-three minutes that Bell plays, seven people stop at least for a minute. Twenty-seven give money, most on the run. As people later review Bell’s performance from a hidden camera, those rushing by Bell appear like ghosts. Only Bell seems real./ “But Martha was distracted by her many tasks.”
John Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He heads up the escalator. It’s a long, slow one-minute, 15-second ride,/ so he gets a good earful of music before his first look at the musician.
Mortensen is the first person to stop, the man at the six-minute mark. He is a project manager at the Department of Energy. He knows nothing about classical music but hears something he later says that makes him “feel at peace.”/ He looks at his watch and realizes he is three minutes early for his budget meeting. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. He promptly leaves and gives money to a street musician for the first time in his life./ “She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.”/
There are six moments in the video that Bell feels painful to re/live: the awkward times after the end of each piece: nothing. /The music stops./ The same people who don’t
notice him playing do not realize he has stopped./ No applause,/ no acknowledgment. “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”/
After “Chaconne” is Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” a musical prayer among history’s most familiar religious pieces. After a few minutes, something happens. A mother and her 3-year-old preschooler, Evan, emerge from the escalator. You can see Evan clearly in the video. He keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell as his mother briskly propels him toward the door. His mother, an IT director for a federal agency, later says she is in a time crunch: “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evan off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.” She moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. Evan is still craning to look, as they exit the arcade.
In fact, every single child, who walks by tries to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent pulls the child away.”/ “There is need of only one thing./Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
The best seats in the house are a few feet away from Bell in the arcade at the busy kiosk selling lottery tickets for the Daily 6. No one in the line, often five or six people long during the entire 43 minutes, ever looks up at Bell./
Bell ends “Ava Maria” and four other pieces to another thunderous silence. Bell comments that he feels invisible, even though he is making a lot of noise! He notices people speaking louder on their cell phones as they pass by to overcome his “noise.”/
Then there is Calvin Myint. He works for the General Services Administration. He gets to the top of the escalator, turns, and heads straight for the door. When asked later about the musician four feet away from him at the Metro, he has no reco/llec/tion. There is nothing wrong with his hearing. Myint is listening to his iPod. With iPods, we hear what we already know and program as our playlists. We are not open to something new coming into our ears. Myint is listening to “Just Like Heaven” by the British rock band The Cure. The song is about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of our eyes./
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.”
In preparing for the event, editors at the Post Magazine discussed how to deal with crowd control when people realized it was Joshua Bell. Only one latecomer recognizes Bell. Stacy Furukawa, who admits not knowing much about classical music, had been at Bell’s free concert at the Library of Congress three weeks earlier. She positions herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, /center. She has a massive grin on her face until he stops playing, introduces herself to Bell, and tosses in a twenty. Not counting that (it was tainted by recognition), Bell makes $32.17 for 43 minutes of playing. Yes, some people gave pennies./
“Actually, Bell said with a laugh, “that’s not bad. About $40 an hour. I can make an OK living on that and don’t have to pay an agent.” //
“Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
The cultural hero of the day arrives late at L’Enfant Plaza in the figure of John Pic/a/rello, a small man with a bald head. Picarello hits the top of the escalator just as Bell begins his final piece, a repr(e)ise of “Chaconne.” He stops dead in his tracks,/ stands across from the lottery line,/ and does not move for nine minutes. Like all the passers/by interviewed about any unusual happening that morning on the way to work, Picarello is the only one who immediately mentions the violinist. His response is, “I have never heard anyone of that caliber. I did not go close but walked far away so I would not intrude in his space.” Picarello had studied the violin but gave it up when he realized he could never make a living from it. He is now a supervisor at the US Postal Service. As he leaves, Picarello says, “I humbly threw in $5.” He barely looks at Bell and tosses in the money. Embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be. Asked later about having regret about not pursuing music, the postal supervisor says, “No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally,/ it’s not a waste. Because you still have it. You have it forever.”/
“There is need of only one thing./ Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”/
Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” Washington Post, April 8, 2007.
Joshua Bell is currently the musical director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.