A friend recently sent me a somewhat old but extremely interesting link to a Washington Post story. This friend is, among other things, a violinist, and we’d had a conversation about music, complexity, and emotion.

Someone else had mentioned that when we were teenagers, we used to feel deeper emotions when we listened to music – mostly pop songs that would tear bloody lumps out of our wet, sincere hearts.

My friend – let’s call her Sinead – and I agreed that what we did then, as teenagers, with music, was not feeling at all, but a kind of shallow, ego-centric grieving.

The same reason bad pop music stirs emotion in us is the same reason bad writing does as well – it seeks only the emotion that is on the surface. It goes after our shallow, usually self-obsessed thoughts and desires – our predictable responses to life and death, those that society instills in us by whatever way it does, and confirms in us by rewarding us when we respond correctly – and pets and soothes them in a way that makes our feelings feel cosmically significant.

Anyway, this is the conversation we were having after quite a few pints, so forgive me if it’s ridiculous. I am only telling you a story.

Real music – and real emotion – is something that does not make you weep. Think of Natalia Ginzburg’s wonderful line: “I never cry when I am really unhappy.”

Again I’m just telling you the story. I’m not trying to tell you what music is.

The conversation ended – I think – around a conversation about arguably the greatest fifteen minutes of music ever written, Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor – specifically the “Chaconne” movement. It can be played properly by about, oh, five people on earth.

From the Post:

Bach’s “Chaconne” is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It’s exhaustingly long – 14 minutes – and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

Well, it turns out, after listening to it about a thousand times on my iPod, that it is the best fifteen minutes of music I’ve ever heard.

But would I, were I commuting to work, fighting through crowds, generally feeling irritable, stop and listen to “Chaconne” if it were being played by a man in jeans and a baseball cap, standing, for instance, outside Tara Street Station – even a man playing it exceedingly well?

That’s exactly what this Post article is about – an experiment in which about 2,000 Washington DC commuters were treated to the greatest musical composition in history (and some others) played by one of the greatest living violinists.

Two people stopped to listen, and he – the violinist – earned less than forty bucks.

More from the Post:

In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

I don’t know. I can listen to, and appreciate, Bach’s Partita No. 2 on my iPod. Why wouldn’t I be able to appreciate it in Tara Street Station?

I’m writing this not to make some kind of argument, but to draw attention to this experiment, and maybe plug Bach.

If you want to listen to Bach’s “Chaconne,” you can hear it on its Wikipedia page (the sound is not great).

If you want to hear exactly what commuters in DC heard, go listen to the audio of Joshua Bell that morning.