Listening to Music in Silence or Not
My high school English teacher Bud Stillman went to a jazz club to hear Charles Mingus. He got a seat close to the bandstand for his wife and himself. They took their seats and the band started playing. While the Mingus group was playing, Mr. Stillman told his wife, in his gravely voice, “Mingus is really good.” Then Mingus stopped the band and wouldn’t play again until the Stillmans were told to leave. He insisted on complete quiet. I don’t even think Mingus allowed for the traditional applause at the end of solos. It seemed that Mingus wanted the same silence for his music that was an accepted tradition in Western classical music.
People like to go to bars and restaurants to hear music because they are permitted to drink, eat and converse. So Mingus’s call for quiet went against social expectations. I can partly agree with the Mingus approach because it is distracting to concentrate when people are talking and ordering food and drinks. But it is something I expect when I play at these venues. Sometimes it gets out of hand. At Slug’s, a jazz spot in the East Village, someone was bored by the bass solo so he put on a classical music program on his portable radio. Fortunately the patron complied when the bartender told him to turn it off after five tense minutes elapsed.
A musician who played with me in the 1980s believed that audiences had become louder in recent years after recorded music replaced live musicians. Accustomed to talking over recorded music, patrons were habituated to disregarding music even when it was produced by musicians performing right in front of them. It’s an interesting theory, but nothing that you could really prove.
While in jazz, positive audience response at any point of a performance is fully accepted, in Western classical music, the rules are different. Total silence is expected. The custom goes back to the pre-World War II years when conductors such as Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski, the rock stars of the era, insisted on silence, and their countless fans acquiesced. Is there a musical justification for maintaining silence? Here’s what composer Reena Esmail says:
We use our music to transport our listeners from the concert hall to another private world, created by the interaction of the listener’s imagination and the music. This event demands complete silence and a great deal of focus. No one dare cough, breathe too loudly, or rustle a bag for fear of puncturing that delicate sonic plane.
https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/observations-on-the-culture-of-hindustani-classical-music/
In opera, the audience applauds vigorously after a great aria. But in classical music you aren’t supposed to applaud after an analogous spot in a concerto—the cadenza. The cadenza is a spot in a concerto movement when the soloist plays without orchestral accompaniment. Who dares to applaud at the end of a cadenza? Well, one of my siblings, for one. My father and mother were excited to hear cellist Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist in a concerto and brought the entire family. When Rostropovich finished his cadenza, one of my siblings burst into loud applause, accompanied by…no one else! The following day, the New York Times music reporter commented on “the sometime unruly audience.”
Reena Esmail received a Guggenheim grant to study the northern branch of Indian classical music known as Hindustani music. She wrote about her experiences in a fascinating article entitled “Observations on the Culture of Hindustani Classical Music.” Esmail was born in the United States to parents with an Indian heritage, and studied Western classical music from an early age. This grant provided an opportunity to study the music of her ancestors. In some ways she was stuck between two different musical worlds, so she was led to make comparisons between them. While in Western concert halls, audiences are expected to remain seated at least until the end of a piece, in India people walk all over the hall, set up tripods to take photos, and even walk up to the performers to take a photo. While Indian musicians tailor their performances to Western audiences by reducing the length of each piece, In India each piece can last a long time, so it’s not uncommon for audience members to leave the hall for a bit and then return. They talk during the performance, sometimes at great length. “After a particularly virtuosic or ingenious passage, there will be loud remarks of approval (Arre wah! Aesa!–Oh, wow! That’s the way!).”
In her travels within India Esmail met an Indian author in a train who told her that he likes a lot of types of music, but the unnatural behavior in concert halls has made him uncomfortable with Western classical music. What a shame.
Mingus's career went through the transitional period jazz stopped being dance music primarily. The word jazz itself was rejected. The audience dancing, drinking, and socializing became the audience silently auditing the Music, and after a time, in some places, the Music became archival. Did Armstrong or Ellington or Parker ever comment on the changing ethos? I wonder what Gillespie really thought. He was reverential about the music but he was also an entertainer. I saw him a number of times -- he controlled the show with music and humor, although he was critical of Armstrong for his performance style. My guess is that Dizzy wouldn't have taken kindly to loud talking during his performance, unless he asked for it.
In the NYC choral music concerts I sing and attend, the etiquette you describe is observed. People do not applaud between movements or after cadenzas. Not so in suburban areas, though, where such concerts are less frequent. The audience applauds when the music stops, whatever the reason, out of appreciation, not indifference. Once it is understood in that sense, I hope that the performers accept it in that spirit. If absolute silence is needed, I would expect them to request it, as they do the silencing of phones.