Rhetorical Analysis Of Pearls Before Breakfast

Rhetorical Analysis of "Pearls Before Breakfast"

At 7:51 a.m. on January 12, 2007, Joshua Bell, "one of the world's greatest violinists"(3), hid his identity to play a free forty-five-minute presentation, which consisted of six classical masterpieces, at the L' Enfant Plaza Metro Station located in Washington, D.C. He pretended to be a street musician and his anonymous performance was just an experiment to find out if people would be able to recognize and appreciate beauty in the middle of rush hour and their target time to reach their destinations. This musician collaborated with Gene Weingarten, a reporter for the Washington Post, to carry out this experiment. This reporter wrote the results for the experiment under the title "Pearls

Joshua Bell, “A onetime child prodigy" (4), is considered one of the greatest violinists and "finest classical musicians in the world"(2), and performs at the subway station. He plays on a violin handmade in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari and it is worth 3.5 million dollars. This instrument had been stolen twice before Bell purchases it. He does not want to be the theft’s third victim and that's the reason he rides in a taxi for only two or three blocks to get to the station. Also, considering the noises that the trains, the thousands of commuters, and cars outside the subway station make, the acoustics are "surprisingly kind" (2). After all, the internal and external noise of the subway station does not hurt the sound and, even though this performance is not in a concert hall, the acoustics help him to have a great presentation. The six pieces he selects and plays are some of the most elegant and beautiful classical compositions ever written. Bells chooses "Chaconne" to begin his performance and, according to the writer, "Bell didn't say it,… but it is considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master" (9) and also "one of the greatest achievements of any man in history”