Wednesday, May 14, 2008

JOSHUA BELL TOCANDO EN EL METRO

Este correo lo acabo de recibir y no resisto la tentación de publicarlo.
Da para reflexionar, y mucho !!! Aquella podría ser una mañana como otra cualquiera. Un sujeto entra en la estación del Metro, va vestido con un jean, una camiseta barata y se sitúa cerca de la entrada...Extrae un violín de la caja y comienza a tocar con entusiasmo para toda la gente que pasa por allí, es la hora punta de la mañana. Durante los 45 minutos que estuvo tocando el violín, fue prácticamente ignorado por todos los pasajeros del Metro.Nadie sabía que ese músico era precisamente Joshua Bell, uno de los mejores violinistas del mundo, ejecutando sin parar las piezas musicales más consagradas de la historia, con un instrumento muy especial, un violín Stradivarius, estimado en un valor de más de 3 millones de dólares. Unos días antes, Bell había tocado en La Sinfónica de Boston, donde los mejores lugares para el concierto costaban la bagatela de 1000 dólares la entrada. Esta experiencia que ha sido grabada en vídeo, muestra a hombres y mujeres que caminan muy rápido, cada uno haciendo una cosa, pero todos indiferentes al sonido del violín... la iniciativa fue del diario The Washington Post, con la finalidad de lanzar un debate sobre el valor del arte, y de su contexto. LA CONCLUSIÓN: Estamos acostumbrados a dar valor a las cosas cuando están en un determinado contexto. En este caso, Bell era una obra de arte en sí mismo, pero fuera de contexto, un artefacto de lujo sin la etiqueta de la marca.
Personalmente me ha impactado la experiencia, y he sentido en mí mismo, los errores habituales en los que he caído, precisamente por no saber distinguir el valor de algunas cosas y de algunas personas por sí mismas, sin conceptuaciones, contextos, marcas, modas o etiquetas... sí, realmente es un estudio que merece toda la consideración... no sé a ustedes...a mí me ha dejado sin palabras... Aquí puedes ver el video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw>

1 Comments:

Blogger Pedro Baques said...

Sobre el particular, un extracto de lo que dijo el Washington Post:

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.


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.


Monday, April 9, 2007 1 p.m. ET
Post Magazine: Too Busy to Stop and Hear the Music
Can one of the nation's greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Gene Weingarten set out to discover if violinist Josh Bell -- and his Stradivarius -- could stop busy commuters in their tracks.

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Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. 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?

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.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

3:04 PM  

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