[Dixielandjazz] Audience Noise During Concerts

[Steve Barbone]

Remembering past threads about "Silence" during jazz performances and how
they related to silence during classical performances, here are some other
views about "Silence" during Classical performances.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time

NY TIMES - By BERNARD HOLLAND - January 8, 2008

Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public
offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant
whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that
one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How
serious we look, and how absurd we are.

³Silence is not what we artists want,² Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in
³After the Golden Age,² a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the
19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press.
³We want applause.²

George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic¹s hat, wrote that the silence
at a London performance of Liszt¹s ³Dante² Symphony represented not rapt
attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like
them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements,
although in Beethoven¹s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody
played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.

I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr.
Hamilton¹s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also
clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on
³Là ci darem la mano² with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping
approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was
applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of ³La Campanella.²

Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age,
yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart¹s A minor
Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the
first-movement cadenza of Beethoven¹s ³Emperor² Concerto regularly brought
down the house, no matter that the movement wasn¹t over.

In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and
deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the
best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something
palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout
approval without making a sound.

In describing the hypocrisies of ³golden age² pursuers and other nostalgia
freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to
original instruments and original performance practices, it has to
acknowledge original audiences too.

Elias Canetti¹s 1960 book ³Crowds and Power² offers the best metaphor for
modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions
from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak
when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this
recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to
do with Germanic art¹s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata
is like Wagner¹s ³Parsifal,² and listeners should get down on their knees.

Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist
Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing ³so loud that it made it
difficult for the ladies to talk,² Mr. Hamilton writes. Today¹s listeners,
still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts
in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers
long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the
final cadences in Donizetti doesn¹t make much difference. In ³Parsifal² it
is a disaster, and a frequent one.

Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical
idea of ³one man, one recital,² but musical events were usually variety
shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an
occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players,
quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the
march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the
door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.

Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a
symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830,
other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most
celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven¹s Violin
Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his
violin upside down and on one string.

Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though
people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased
accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but
frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein
become lost in Ravel¹s ³Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,² simply diddling
idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.

No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would
treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of
³Werktreue,² or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the
19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed
audiences how hard the piece at hand was.

My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms¹s playing his own B
flat Piano Concerto. ³Brahms did not play the right notes,² he wrote, ³but
he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.²

There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so
brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in
Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during
a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing
the interpretation blow by blow.

Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village
band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing,
and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low
hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It
was the most profound concert experience of my life.