Antiestablishment Enthusiasm

From the Vault Dept.: What was I pondering in print 40 years ago? I had just started writing for Albany’s Metroland Magazine, before it became an alt-weekly. Paul Grossman, the editor, welcomed classical-music coverage, including such musings as you find below.

                                                                                        

THE STRANGEST ASPECT of a classical musical concert is the expected regulation of audience enthusiasm. A curious tradition of etiquette is at work here, requiring you to applaud politely only after the piece is over – the sort of thing you were trained to do during grade-school assemblies. But music, being a totally aural art, makes a direct appeal to the senses. And, being a real-time experience, it carries its own momentum, which can produce an excitement you’ll find in no other entertainment. The instrumentalist is trained to sing through a device not connected with the body. An ensemble strives to attain a single identity out of all these abstractions, and therein the magic lies: when that goal is accomplished, you, the listener, are liable to be emotionally transported far beyond the concert hail.

Michael Sylvester, tenor

But don’t applaud too much! And never between movements! The classical Establishment gives that sort of behavior a great big frown. I wonder if those who have put their music on such a pedestal aren’t responsible for driving away a large potential audience with this restraint stuff. It’s your means of communicating with the performers, after all. And they like to know how they’re doing. You wouldn’t let a good lick go unapplauded during a rock or jazz concert, and opera audiences, those unique beasts, are great at showing the singers a response. So here we have an orchestra, or a chamber group or, especially, a soloist, who has just tossed off a neat, nasty movement with aplomb, and you’ll find that most of the audience just sitting there, rustling, coughing, opening the program again.

Most audiences – but not all. A college-student audience can be very responsive, and I’ve never known a performer to dislike the attention. A Carnegie Hall crowd, on the other hand, can be deathlike. They don’t even cough.

It wasn’t always this way. Time was when a movement went well, the audience not only would applaud and cheer, but the movement would be repeated! It’s only during this century that overpoliteness has hit, and it’s not very coincidentally related to something brought up in a column by Edward T. Canby in Audio magazine, who points out that the labels “classical” and “pop” seem to have been born with the birth of recordings, wedging the audience in two directions. I’m going to agree with Canby, and add that this classical gang, these would-be highbrows, continue to carry on the old traditions of royalty, subordinating music to a servant’s status.

While you don’t want to revive every old custom – rotten vegetables as critical projectiles, for example – I think the time has come to let classical music carry us away as much as the music can. Applaud it, dance to it, for crying out loud, if you’ve got room to do so. If it moves you to excitement, respond accordingly. If you don’t feel like clapping, don’t. If you want to boo – well, let’s save that for a truly horrible performance. The folks up there are usually doing their best, and deserve respect for it. And pay no attention to the critics. They, like myself, are merely people allowed to put their opinions into the papers. The music is for your benefit.

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CONCERTS OF INTEREST coming our way include the Big Band Show of ‘84 at Proctor’s, Sunday at 7 PM. Then on Wednesday at 8 PM, the New York City Opera presents Puccini’s La Bohème at Proctor’s – fully staged, with full orchestra. This is the tremulous tale of artists starving all over the place, which can be lots of fun when you consider how hefty so many singers can be. However, it’s a trim, youthful cast coming to Schenectady, probably not too long out of their own starving-artist days. Michael Sylvester and Young Mi Kim headline the cast as Rodolfo and Mimi; David Parsons is Marcello a painter and Bruce Kramer is Colline, a philosopher. Kramer should be familiar to area audiences: he has spent time in this area with the Lake George Opera Company.

– Metroland Magazine, 16 February 1984