Once More Unto The Breach

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 10:19 AM Eastern on 3 Mar. See below.]

It's been batted about at such length and for so long that by this time we would have thought the pop-culture-, rock-"concert"-inspired notion of active participation by an audience during a classical music concert — i.e., while the music is being performed — rather than undistracted, focused listening would by this time have been thoroughly discredited.

But, no, the notion seems to be still alive and kicking as witness this latest from the man who, in partnership with the mad-genius inventors of the device, brought you the prole-pandering horror known as the Concert Companion (happily, no longer still alive and kicking), and who is now suggesting that audiences attending classical music concerts be permitted to use their cell phones or whatever to post to Twitter(!) (called, "tweeting") about the concert while the music is ongoing:

Some people don't like this — and understandably, of course — because they feel that it would interfere with listening. That's a point to take seriously. We have a tradition (not as long-established as we think it is, but still very firmly established now) of listening to classical music in silence, without distractions.

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I want to make it clear that I sympathize with them, and that — no matter what innovations might appear — there should be concerts, maybe the majority of concerts (to serve our existing audience), where nothing will trouble people who want to listen silently.

Where I take issue, though, is when the discussion turns ideological — when people say that classical music absolutely demands silent listening, and when some of us start drawing large conclusions about our society, saying...that we're bombarded by music everywhere, and that we might be losing the ability to truly listen.

I don't agree with either point. I've said many times that the entire pre-19th century classical repertoire — with the exception, I'd imagine, of church music — was created for performances when the audience talked while the music played, and applauded whenever they heard anything they liked. There's no sign that composers disapproved of this. Quite the contrary — we have evidence from Mozart and Verdi, for instance, that they were highly gratified.

See? Mozart and Verdi not only didn't disapprove of chattering audiences who applauded whenever the spirit moved them, they were even gratified by it, and if it was OK for Mozart and Verdi, well, then, it should be OK for us as well.

This sort of half-truth sophistry has long been a linchpin argument of those who want to bring a rock-"concert" sensibility into the concert hall in order to put new young butts into seats. We addressed this tendentious, dishonest rubbish-reasoning on S&F some years ago and what would obtain should that reasoning be put into actual practice but feel we should make the point again as it can never be too often repeated. And what we wrote was this:

Champions of the idea of a return to the concert etiquette of the 18th and 19th centuries where the audience practice was, for instance, to show approval by clapping between movements, are forever citing examples of famous composers of the time seemingly showing their pleasure in, even approval of, the practice, the point of adducing the examples being to convince us that if the practice was approved by composers such as those, then we should have no objection to, ought to even encourage, such practice today.

But the examples adduced by these champions are totally specious, and citing them, the worst sort of sophistry. That, for instance, Brahms thought a new piano concerto of his a failure because instead of applause there was only silence after each of the first two movements, or that Mozart purposely wrote into a movement of a symphony certain passages calculated to provoke an audience to applause, and reveled in the success of that device, shows only that both composers were keenly aware of, and sensitive to, the prevailing concert etiquette of their respective times, and what was expected and when from an audience as a sign of its pleasure. The examples in no way demonstrate those composers' in-principle pleasure in, and approval of, that etiquette. It was simply a fact of musical life in those times, the consequence of largely musically ignorant and uncouth audiences, both aristocratic and bourgeois, and as working composers who depended on those audiences for their daily bread and cheese, Mozart and Brahms had little choice but to accept and play by the rules of that etiquette.*

Classical music critics writing today who champion such changes in our present-day classical music concert etiquette for the express purpose of making the classical music concert more inviting to, and comfortable for, the masses are simply as wrongheaded about the matter as they could possibly be, notwithstanding how well-intentioned their championing, and seem oblivious of the wholesale damage that would obtain were their proposals put into actual practice.

One classical music critic who champions such make-it-inviting-for-the-masses alterations to what he considers, generally, the ossified and elitist classical music concert practices of the present-day declares in hopeful metaphor, "When the age of the dinosaurs ends, the age of the mammals begins."

I suggest that a better metaphor for what would obtain were the practices this critic and his like-minded colleagues champion put into actual practice would be what obtained on the island of Guam when the alien common brown tree snake was by error introduced into the environment, whereupon their numbers rapidly multiplied. In fairly short order, all native bird species on the island disappeared, their song silenced forever. Today, only the squawking of chickens and the hum and clatter of modern-day commerce prevail there.

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* As a composer of opera, Mozart was most especially cognizant of the necessity of audience-pleasing effects and of what would provoke an audience's applause as he had not only to consider the circus-stunt-hungry audience, but the demands of singers that he write for them arias that would show off to best effect their virtuoso vocal skills and so bring a maximum of immediate bravos from the audience for their performance. Typical on this matter are these comments from the 25-year-old Mozart in a letter to his Papa concerning the composition of Die Entführung, his debut operatic effort in Vienna: "The Janissary Chorus has everything you can desire from a Janissary chorus; it's short and lively — written entirely for the Viennese. I sacrificed Konstanze's aria a bit to the agile throat of Mademoiselle Cavalieri [Caterina Cavalieri, the foremost prima donna of the time] ... [in which aria] I tried to be as expressive as an Italian Bravura aria will permit."

A gifted composer's creative life, then as now, is not an easy one, fraught as it often is with unwelcome compromise. One imagines just how much Mozart would have welcomed and been pleased by the more enlightened understanding and properly attentive reception of his works by today's better behaved, better musically informed classical music concert audiences.

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Update (10:19 AM Eastern on 3 Mar): For a clarifying addendum to the above, see this post.