Can Beauty Transcend the Ordinary? - Pt. 2

I flipped a coin this morning over how to spend my lunch hour: writing at a coffeehouse or running at the gym. My head beat my tail. Writing won.

My favorite coffeehouse can make my day with a good batch of snickerdoodle joe, so imagine my glee when they offered a better surprise: an impromtu performance by two violinists. The music was beautiful! I’d love to share the name of the song I swooned over as I walked in, but I only know it wasn’t included in my early study of classical music (the Tom & Jerry School of Music). When they finished to applause, they asked their quiet, coffee-sipping audience, “Does anyone here like AC/DC?” Um, yeah! These two violinists proceeded to rock out “Back in Black.” Rocked it.

I settled into a table and began my usual struggle to write (one page! why is one page so hard to write one damn page?), but my words provided weak competition against the music, which segued from the “Love Story“ theme to Guns N Roses. I remembered the Washington Post article about a renowned classical violinist playing one of the world’s most valuable violins in a Metro station while most people only scurried past. The Post’s experiment: Can beauty transcend the ordinary? It didn’t. I shamefully recognized myself in the story -- the person sometimes too distracted to notice pretty things -- and vowed to reform. So while sitting in Dilworth Coffee amid beautiful music, I set my work aside to listen and enjoy. Despite my less-than-sophisticated palette for classical music, I recognized this as amazing work. All guilt about skipping the workout and the writing disappeared.

During a break, one of the violinists approached me with the line, “So I’m happily married and not looking for anything like that, but you seem into music, and we’d like to talk to you.” Have a seat, fellas! These were classically trained musicians who went to conservatory together then toured internationally for fifteen years. As their careers sucked the joy out of music, they each broke out on their own. One traded downtown Chicago for a West Virginian farm, then bought a bus and took his family on the road as he performed smaller shows. Now that they’ve partnered, these two musicians perform everywhere from concert halls to dinner parties and play the music they like (“for some reason, our conductor frowned upon performing AC/DC”). We exchanged information, and I promised to see them play when they returned to town. They asked if I found it weird to come across two violinists randomly playing in a coffeehouse. I shook my head and asked if they read the Post article about a famous violinist playing in a Metro station. The guys laughed and said, “Yeah, Josh Bell is a friend of ours.”

Ever the skeptic, I hit Google. The name of the violinist in the 2007 WaPo story? Joshua Bell. The story about a famous musician leaving Chicago to move to a farm in West Virginia? Recounted in news articles. The instrument played by this musician? A rare Bernardus Calcanius violin made in 1750. Check him out yourself. I’d be lucky to hear these guys play Carnegie, much less a tiny coffeehouse in Charlotte.

Three years ago, I tortured myself with the question posed by the Post: would I stop my routine to appreciate a classically trained musician playing a rare violin during an ordinary moment? It seemed an experiment impossible to replicate, but today I got my reassuring answer. And the bonus? Unexpected moments of beauty do wonders against writer’s block. I finally had something to fill my one page. You just read it.