applause – always a good thing?

There’s an interesting piece on the Guardian website today by renowned American classical music critic Alex Ross – I’ve had his highly recommended book, The Rest is Noise, for ages and tried to get into reading it a few times but always got distracted, should really get back on it… In this article, he’s talking about the etiquette for applause and audience response in the classical concert hall, and it got me thinking about the similarities and differences between classical and jazz audiences.

Ross briefly mentions jazz audiences in his article (“in jazz clubs… people applaud after each solo, as well as at the end of each number”), which obviously simplifies things a lot but I suppose is safe enough to be taken as a general rule. Sometimes, however, clapping by default after a solo is totally inappropriate. I was at a gig recently by a trio that was almost contemporary classical rather than jazz – even though the trio were world class musicians in their own right there was unfortunately not many in the audience (those that were there weren’t even there specifically for the gig as the concert was one small part of a larger event), the music was pretty quiet throughout, and the whole affair was quite intimate. After every single solo though, no matter what the wider musical context, the person next to me (not with me! Just happened to be sat next to me) decided to clap as loud and as forcefully as possible in order to rally the rest of the audience into joining them. As I say the gig was really intimate, the solos were thoughtful, melodic and reflective rather than animated, loud and technical, and having all the musician’s hard work in building up an atmosphere rudely cancelled out by this person’s instant rapturous applause really started to piss me off – I think the musicians were also not impressed as they seemed to be a bit awkward in acknowledging the rather muted, sheep-like applause…

The point of Ross’ article was that people should be allowed to respond to music whenever and however they feel most appropriate rather than having to follow in some sort of etiquette. In the same way that refraining from applause after a massive final cadence in the first movement of a Beethoven symphony feels strange, for example, surely being made to feel duty-bound to applaud after the quietest and most reflective improvised solo in a jazz gig is also inappropriate? Ross quotes the pianist Emanuel Ax, who I think sums it up perfectly – “I think that if there were no ‘rules’ about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.”

Posted by Ben on 09/03/2010 at 16:59 in misc and tagged , , , . Leave comments here.