Alex Ross, music critic for New Yorker magazine and author of the excellent book The Rest is Noise which I reviewed recently, gave a fascinating lecture to the Royal Philharmonic Society in March on the subject of applause, which can now be read online (PDF).[I]t seems in line with what you find today in jazz clubs, where people applaud after each solo as well as at the end of each number. It is an interruption, to be sure, but it also is a signal of attentiveness and a demarcation of structure. To us, it may seem bizarre that great works of music originated in such boisterous settings, but there may be a hidden correlation between the music’s capacity for “rapture” and the audience’s capacity to show it. We can find a few relics of this kind of audience participation here and there, notably at the Proms, but for the most part it has become unthinkable. And music may have lost something in the process. I would certainly be interested to see a contemporary composer defy expectations in such a way that the audience is shocked into applause.
But all that will be for naught without an audible and visible increase of passion onstage. I am hardly the only critic who believes that performances these days are altogether too focused on getting the notes right and insufficiently concerned with projecting style, emotion, the force of a phrase, the power of a large-scale structural conception. The scholar Robert Philip writes that the modern international style of performance, propagated through recordings, is a distinctly mixed blessing: it has generally raised standards, but it “limits the development of individual imagination, and it drives out local traditions.” At its worst, it leads to “staleness,” to “predictable perfection.” These phrases sum up too many nights of recent years.
The one advantage we as performers have over iPods is direct communications, spontaneity, and musicality. If those aren't your top priorities as performers, you're writing your own epitaph.
donald patriquin says
Never forget that music is ‘listened to’ in the moment it is performed, but it is ‘heard’ and reflected upon in the silences that are within the music itself, and also after the music ceases. “The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more” (W.S.)
I guess much has to do with one’s intent on listening to a piece of music. Is it chiefly for the performance, in which case – as perhaps with jazz – immediate applause comes quite naturally, or is it mainly for the content, in which case at least a short period of silence is golden? Concerts featuring renowned, highly skilled artists of course fit into both categories, and that’s the rub!
Consider also that a musical work that ends with a vibrant, fast passage or movement tends to elicit immediate physical reaponse, whereas a works that ends more introspectively and quietly tends to promote introspection and silence, even for a short period of time, as Tim Banks implies. If you really want to hear beautiful music performed without applause put on your favorite CD or go to a fine church service. (There are exceptions!).
Timothy Banks says