Concert Etiquette. Hands up who “gets” it?... Hands up who just gets confused?... Oh, just me then.
Seriously though, there’s a whole thing around how to behave in concerts that I have never quite got my head around, mainly because I’m terrible at sitting still. I had a conversation with a pianist once, who had just done a recital in the Wigmore Hall. He complained about the audience member in the front row who appeared to read a book the whole way through the event. If she was going to pay so little attention, he grumbled, couldn’t she just have stayed home?
Now, while sitting in the front row to read your book is perhaps a whole issue in itself, I can well imagine that she might possibly be the kind of listener who actually pays more attention, not less, through the lens of her book. While I might not want to read in a concert, I would have to confess to being an inveterate doodler/drawer/crocheter. If my hands are engaged, so is my mind and so are my ears. The way concert etiquette works, though, I only do this if I can do so undetected. I am well aware that this is seen as impolite to both performers (you’re not paying enough of the right kind of attention) and other members of the audience (you’re being distracting). Thanks, Hanslick. Maybe we should start splitting concert halls like weddings: “Good evening, madam, which side would you like? The sitting still side, or the doodlers? Right this way, follow me.”
Having said all that, it has been more and more in my consciousness just what it means for composer, performers and listeners that ways of listening have changed so much, even for the most traditionalist of concertgoers, and just how much, therefore, we ask of audiences. Even one hundred years ago, the only way of hearing music for most people – at least, music played by others – was to hear it live and in its entirety. Filing into a hall where people sat in serried rows and just listened was par for the course, if you liked that sort of thing. People were accustomed to it. (I differentiate between this and listening to oneself play partly because I find musicians some of the worst at sitting still in concerts.)
Things changed slowly but surely as technology made music ever more present, until we arrive at our current culture, with its almost incessant soundtrack. It’s made an enormous difference to how we engage with music, and it has dawned on me just how much of an ask it is to expect listeners to fulfil the role of a pre-recording audience, to leave their 21st-century ears and thought processes at the door. For some, this is second nature. For others, it is a struggle that can’t be won, no matter their relationship with the music itself. I mentioned Eduard Hanslick above, that proponent of “active” listening over “passive” listening, who did little to disguise his contempt for people who might simply let music wash over them in a wave of sensory enjoyment. He would have hated lift music.
E. M Forster wrote beautifully of what an audience really is, as opposed to what it’s assumed to be. He has just been to one Myra Hess’s National Gallery concerts that happened almost weekly throughout WWII:
“There is no such person as the average concert-goer, and no one can speak in his name. Not only does our enjoyment of music differ, but our attention wanders from it in different directions, and returns to it at different angles; so that if the soul of an audience could be photographed it would resemble a flight of scattering dipping birds, who belong neither to the air nor the water nor the earth. In theory the audience is a solid slab, provided with a single pair of enormous ears, which listen, and with a pair of hands, which clap. Actually it is that elusive scattering flight of winged creatures, darting around, and spending much of its time where it shouldn’t, thinking now “how lovely!”, now “my foot’s gone to sleep”, and passing in the beat of a bar from “there’s Beethoven back in C Minor again!” to “did I turn the gas off?” or “I do think he might have shaved”. Meanwhile Beethoven persists, Beethoven does not flicker, Beethoven plays himself through. Applause. The piano is closed, the instruments re-enter their cases, the audience disperses more widely, the concert is over.”
Christiane Tewinkel has also written about internal distraction being far more important in analysing a listening experience than is external distraction (“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts”, from The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries) ; but alongside this, we need to think about the choices we make that were once deliberate and now so engrained in our everyday life that we have forgotten that they were once voluntary. Interestingly, in some of these choices we seem to have returned to nineteenth-century values. The hierarchy of genre is re-dissolving. Just as in the late nineteenth-century you could hear ballad and art song on the same platform at the same time, or explicitly programmatic music alongside the austerely formal, so now can you choose “programming” options that never would have made it onto many concert platforms of the late twentieth century. I remember one particular concert I gave with a flautist in the late 1990s, when the venue director only very reluctantly allowed us to play Schubert’s Trockne Blumen variations alongside Poulenc’s sonata (“After all, it’s not exactly great music, is it?”). Nowadays, I might even blow his mind further by playing one or two variations, perhaps separated by other works, as most of us might often choose to listen. The hegemony of the full work, a much later aesthetic conceit than is often thought, is vanishing rapidly. A nineteenth-century listener wouldn’t blink twice, being already accustomed to performer selection.
There are, though, many ways in which we have arrived at the opposite side to the pre-recording audience. I have already written of the fact that many people hear most of their music through head/earphones, and certainly the vast majority through technology. Those headphones ensure that even when we are in a room with others, our listening experience takes place in isolation. This isn’t just a psychological separation, but is also a technological one. My headphones and my device render a sound-world quite apart from yours, much more than is engendered by our different seats in a concert hall. Not only that, but the performers have vanished, too, disembodied and distant, although conversely, the sound they produce is closer than it’s ever been, pulsing straight into our covered ears. There is little pre-listening information readily available, bar the thumbnail of the often random artwork of the album cover; sometimes it’s hard even to find the name of either performer or composer, depending on the scrolling banner that a streaming service has decided fits their algorithms best. A case in point was the Dora Bright piano concerto recording that was reviewed on these pages last month. On one particular streaming service, the only search that brought up the recording was one for the [male] conductor. Composer and performer names drew a blank. The idea that liner notes might be hanging around somewhere is laughably archaic. You can often google these, but who has the time to do that very often? Our control over the time-lapse of music is completely different, too. We can choose to play a track over and over, or even start and stop within a track, skipping backwards and forwards over the phrases. We’ve become bookshop browsers, flicking through a paperback to see if we feel like committing to the longer read.
And what effect does all this have on how we approach concert-giving? Perhaps none; but it’s certainly worth being aware of the far wider range of listening habits to which we have to relate as performers. Personally, I enjoy fragmentation as well as the narrative arcs of full works. The range of choice, and the relationship between vastly different works, become programming tools that excite me. And as we return to live music making, the opportunities we have are endless. Here’s to a new era.