Life, Beauty, Soul, Context

Thought-provoking experiment and some profound observations by Washington Post.


Wonder why it reminds me of KM programs in organizations ;-) Do we always work out of context? How does one play music in such a way that passers-by change their priorities and stop and listen? Ha ha ha!

Quotes:

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

• In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
• The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius.
• IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?
• What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?
• At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.
• Context matters

• The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
• Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
• What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. -- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies
• This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.
• "Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me."