Author’s Note: This is another of those weeks when you need to exercise a little patience if you want to know what the topic is. Take comfort in the knowledge that the ability to cope with delayed gratification is a sign of maturity.

This week we range far and wide, from the Washington DC Metro to the Bridgend Recreation Centre in South Wales, and then to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Coupled with the title, that’s just about the most obscure clue for this week’s topic. I’m not even sure Bernice will get it.

It occurred to me on Friday night, as I lay in bed musing over possible topics for this week, that I really needed a strategy that would provide topics for multiple weeks, since the British strain seems likely to set our progress in fighting Corona back several weeks, if not months. (Incidentally, I understand from my brother Martin that the British strain is called the Kent strain in Britain, in what looks to me suspiciously like an attempt on the part of London to absolve itself of all responsibility. One wonders whether South Africans speak of the Jo’burg, or Brazilians of the Belo Horizonte strain.)

After a little thought, I came up with an idea. So, as things stand at the moment, the plan is that, at intervals of a few weeks, I am going to talk about a number of different musical instruments. (I have to tell you: the idea sounded much more exciting late Friday night in bed than it does in the cold light of Sunday morning, sitting on the page and staring at me.)

First big question: which instrument do I start with? I eventually opted for the violin, for a number of reasons, none of which is that it is my favourite instrument. It actually isn’t, although I’m not entirely sure why not. I suspect that the violin can produce a wider range of colours, of textural diversity, than any other instrument; a vast amount of the greatest music ever written was written for solo violin, or for chamber ensembles prominently featuring the violin; very many of classical music’s most striking, engaging, eccentric characters were and are violinists.

It may be because of my personal relationship with the instrument, which was short-lived but traumatic. I was actually praised for my performance of a Paganini violin concerto on stage to a paying audience in one of England’s most distinguished theatres….Well, not the entire concerto: just the slow movement….Then again, not the entire movement: just part of it…three bars, to be exact….And, to be fair, the only person who knew that it was a Paganini violin concerto was me (and that only because I knew that’s what I had been practising, and not because the tune was recognisable).

Let me give you a context. The amateur dramatics group that I was involved in in the 80s in Nantymoel, the South Wales mining village we then lived in, was fortunate enough to win through to the British finals of a one-act drama competition, with a farcical piece entitled Hidden Meanings. Please don’t feel bad that you’ve never heard of it. I played the role of a man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and the play opened with me playing the violin.

Much of the humour of the play lay in the character’s total unsuitability to inhabit the persona of Holmes, ranging from his complete lack of powers of logical reasoning to his very poor violin playing. We had a good friend who is a fine amateur violinist, and he foolishly agreed to lend me his violin and give me a quick lesson or two. I practised for hours, determined to put on a convincing performance as a barely competent fiddler, and my performance won praise from the adjudicator at the finals. Unfortunately, what he praised it for was my amazing ability to play so excruciatingly badly.

This experience left me with redoubled admiration for the technical skill of the violinist. To extract a single, pure note from this fiendish instrument seems to me to require great talent: to play Paganini’s Caprice #1 at all I find remarkable; to play it in 1:34, as Itzhak Perlman does here is scarcely credible; to make it sound like music, as he does, wonderfully and effortlessly, is to run the risk of attracting rumours like that which surrounded virtuoso Paganini himself, that he (or his mother) had sold his soul to the devil in order to play so fiendishly well.

Yet neither I, nor even Perlman, was one of the violinists I actually wanted to talk about today. (How about that: a sentence about violinists where I come before Itzhak Perlman; pinch me, somebody.) Three of them are great virtuosi who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see without having to travel very far from home. Indeed, we could have walked to hear Kyung Wha Chung give a recital in the hall of our local recreation centre, in Bridgend. As a young woman, she was an incredibly intense performer, as you can see from the last minute of the first movement of Schumann’s Violin Sonata #2, starting at around 16:20.

On the evening we heard her, she chose to play Bach’s Partita #1. What none of us realised was that the ‘concert’ hall shared a wall with one of the centre’s squash courts. Two or three minutes into the Bach, two players started a game, and the sound of the ball hitting the back wall came clearly though to us. To her credit, the soloist did not walk out, but soldiered on. How she managed to maintain her total concentration, absorption and intensity, I don’t know. Even so, it was an unforgettable experience, but not really for the reason we had hoped.

The strongest contrast to that level of almost painful intensity came around the same time, when we travelled only a little further afield, to hear Isaac Stern play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. This concerto has an unusually long introduction from the orchestra, about three and a half minutes, before the soloist begins playing. For all of that time, my eyes were on Stern, and I could scarcely believe what I was watching. For the entire time, he stood quietly on stage, for all the world like a man casually waiting for a Number 16 bus.

Then, a second before his first entrance, he raised the violin to his chin in one fluid movement, raised his bowing arm in another, and began producing the most tender and beautiful music. He was probably then in his early 60s, and the contrast between his matter-of-fact, ‘just another day at the office’ demeanour on stage, and the exquisite beauty of the music he made that evening has stayed with me for decades.

The last, and youngest, of this trio, is Joshua Bell, who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see in Jerusalem with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra – a very generous 60^th birthday present. He was playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which I must confess is not one of my favourite pieces: I find its whimsy a little wearing after a while. His performance, however, was mesmerising. There certainly seems to be something about the violin, more than other instruments, that attracts the showman and exudes raw, sensual charm. From Paganini to Nigel Kennedy, violinists have generated an electric charge that is palpable. Bell is nowhere near such an outrageous showman, but he is certainly a superstar, and, on the basis of our experience that evening, that stardom is well deserved.

I’ve referenced Joshua Bell mainly to retell, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the interesting story of the Washington Post experiment. When Bell was in Washington in 2007 to play a single concert, he was persuaded by the Washington Post to busk anonymously in a busy arcade just outside L’Enfant Plaza Metro station during the morning rush hour. This turned out to be a 45-minute recital, on a 3.5-million-dollar Stradivarius violin, by a man who, at the time, played to capacity audiences in major concert halls, commanding an average ticket price of $100.

The busk was filmed, to see how many of the commuters and others passing by recognised him, or even stopped to listen. In the event, of over 1000 people, only seven people stopped to listen: one for nine minutes, one for three minutes, and each of the others for a much shorter time. Only one person recognised him, and spoke to him at the end of the ‘recital’; a few others, when interviewed later, had been struck by the quality of his playing. With this handful of exceptions, Bell was completely ignored. He made about $40 in the 45 minutes.

So, what are we to make of this? Many people use it as an example of the importance of mindfulness, of being aware of what is going on around you, of being in the moment. This is undoubtedly a nice-sounding lesson to draw, but I am not sure how fair it is.

There is another famous experiment, which I will not describe for fear of influencing the result for anyone who doesn’t know it, but which involves counting the passes between basketball players. What that experiment demonstrates is the human ability to concentrate on what is judged to be important at any given moment, rather than to be receptive to all that is going on.

I believe that most of the passers-by were thinking about and preparing for the working day ahead of them, worrying about other family members, or simply concentrating on not colliding with other commuters. Personally, I don’t want the driver of the bus I am on to be smelling the roses, but rather to be watching the road.

One interesting, but probably not surprising, point is that at least two of the seven who did stop were musicians, albeit amateurs, and recognised immediately the quality of the playing. For some people, music is always important.

This story reminds me of two other busking incidents. In the 1990s, a flood of aliya of Jews from Russia brought with it many fine professional musicians. (A popular joke at the time ran: ‘How can you tell a Russian orchestral conductor? He’s the one walking down the steps from the plane not carrying a violin case.’) The Israeli authorities greatly expanded music education in primary schools, to accommodate some of this influx, and this gave both of our children, among many others, their first steps in music-making.

It also strengthened Israel’s existing orchestras, and gave birth to more than one new one. My violinist friend who I mentioned earlier once told me that a friend of his, who plays in the IPO, said that, had he not auditioned before the 1990s, he would never have got a place in the orchestra.

Ben Yehuda Street is the main pedestrian precinct in central Jerusalem: it has, for over half a century, been a favourite spot for buskers. Walking down the street on an errand from work one weekday morning, I heard a busking cellist performing Bach’s first unaccompanied cello suite. I like to think that I would not have walked past Bell, because that day in Jerusalem I stood mesmerised for 20 minutes. I only heard the cellist that once, under appalling acoustic conditions, but I still remember it as a wonderful performance.

My final busking story suggests that my friend Stuart Nemtin, whom I met on my post-school year’s youth leadership course in Israel, is a finer violinist than Joshua Bell. As an activity one evening, half of us were required to spend the entire evening in Central Jerusalem, in full view, trying not to be detected by the other half, who were looking for us. Stu dressed as a beggar, took his violin, and busked all evening. Not only was he not detected; he made enough money, as he put it ‘to keep him in cookies for the rest of the year’ (which I calculate to be considerably more than $40 in 2007).

Just in case you’re still worried by that misquote in the title this week, my version of Old King Cole (celebrating the violin talents of myself, Perlman, Chang (or should that be Kyung), Stern, Bell and Nemtin) continues:

              He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
              And he called for his fiddlers six.

Tao may still be a little young to handle violin bowing, but, surrounded by his father’s instruments, he is taking his first musical steps.