More From Alex Ross On Concert Etiquette

New Yorker music critic and weblogger Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise has up an informative post on the history of classical music concert etiquette wherein he speculates on a probable proximate trigger for present-day concert etiquette in this country. Interesting material, and well worth your time reading (it's a rather longish piece in weblog terms).

My response, generally speaking, to the facts and speculations adduced by Alex is that it really makes little difference how or why the concert etiquette tradition prevailing today got started (I put forward my speculations on the matter a few weeks ago in this post). What matters is how it operates in practice, and whether that operation is to the detriment or benefit of the classical music concert itself, and of its audience. My thinking on that question has already been made clear in my previous posts on this subject (here, here, here, and here), and so nothing further from me need be said here concerning it beyond the following:

Alex closes his post with a quote from Christopher Small’s book, Musicking, which quote reads in part:

The silence that will greet tonight's [classical music concert] performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude [from the audience behavior of past eras]. [...] Who we [the audience] are ... is spectators rather than participants, and our silence during the performance is a sign of this condition, that we have nothing to contribute but our attention to the spectacle that has been arranged for us. We might go further and say that we are spectators at a spectacle that is not ours, that our relationship with those who are responsible for the production of the spectacle—the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, and those who make the arrangements for tonight's concert—is that of consumers to producers, and our only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.

In response to that quote, Alex delivers this Parthian shot: "Is it any surprise that a lot of people aren’t buying?"

Here's mine: Precisely the relationship that ought to obtain if one insists on couching that relationship in terms of commerce.

If being a non-contributing recipient (and what else could you as audience member possibly be?) of the wealth of goods bestowed upon you in return for your cash and undivided attention makes you feel small and insignificant when measured against the gifted makers of those goods, well, you are, and your applause won't make you less so, nor will it confer upon you any measure of contribution in the making of those goods.

Get over it.