On a busy Friday morning at the L'Enfant Plaza in Washinton D.C., a young man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans took out a violin and began to play. For the next 45 minutes, the sounds of Bach, Schubert, Ponce, and Massenet could be heard echoing between the halls of the building. Out of the more than one thousand people who passed by, twenty-seven dropped a few dollars into his violin case, and only seven paused to listen to the music. Unbeknownst to the crowd, that man was Joshua Bell—one of the most famous and talented violinists in the world. His violin? Bell purchased it for nearly $4 million. And just a few days prior, Bell’s sold-out concert at the Symphony Hall in Boston brought in over $250,000 in revenue. Needless to say, his street performance at the plaza, though largely overlooked by those in attendance, was a masterpiece that any classical music lover would be dismayed to have missed (Weingarten, 2007).
