What would happen if someone put one of the best violin player in the world, totally anonymous, playing in the Washington DC subway?? Would people stop to listen? Would beauty transcend such banal setting? Now you can find out...


This is one of those amazing articles that makes you stop and wonder if you have been seizing all the beauty that lies around us... In our modern society everything must be made in the fastest and most efficient way, and we are all part of an unstoppable machine that leaves us with no time to put beauty into what we do, as well as no time to appreciate the one that exists around us...


"It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.


No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"
^{in WashingtonPost.com}

This article is a fine piece of writing. Not only is the whole subway situation described in detail, but the journalist also approaches the delicate subject of how we nurture and appreciate beauty nowadays. I don't know if I would've stopped to listen. Unless I were extremely worried about something I had to do in the next hour, I'd probably be hypnotized by that violin's sound, and would stay and contemplate such intriguing violinist.

What I really know is that I stopped to read this article, and it certainly made my day much richer...

The complete news article at [link] (videos included)