Bwog is in slow motion this week due to Thanksgiving.

Bwog freelancer Stephanie Quan isn't a classical music buff, but she got interested in virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell when she heard about this experiment in a D.C. metro station. Eight months later, she snagged a phone interview with the Strad-playing celebrity, and quizzed him on childhood habits and favorite dead people.

josh bellBwog: Hi.

Joshua Bell: Hi! This is Joshua Bell here.

Hi, this is Stephanie. Shall we start? I've got a lot of questions written down here.


I got answers.

So you first began violin after your parents found you playing with rubberbands on your dresser. What inspired you to do that?

Well I grew up with a lot of music around me. So I'm sure that I was stimulated by hearing my mother play the piano and my father, [he] loved music. [he] had a violin himself. Although he was sorta self-taught. But there was just a lot of music going around. All my cousins, my siblings played music. So I suppose hearing all that made me want to make music and my first sort of homemade instruments were those rubberbands on my dresser drawer. Then my parents got me a violin and it was just a very natural thing. It was like learning to speak, you know, playing music. I can't even really remember not playing the violin.

So I've actually had to try this myself... and it's not easy! How does it exactly work? Where do the rubberbands go?

Well I haven't repeated the experiment myself in the last thirty years. I had a set of nine little dresser drawers and I used to string these rubberbands across from one to the next and open up the drawers to different lengths to get different pitches.


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