I mention this not to talk about elitism, which is no part of the purpose of this book (the word has in any case become so loaded that it can hardly any longer be used in rational discussion) but to suggest that in the concert hall, as at any other kind of musical event, there is an underlying kinship between the members of the audience. In a certain sense they are at ease with one another, knowing that there are certain kinds of behavior they can expect of one another and other kinds that they need not.
The members of this audience know that they can rely on one another to make the effort to arrive on time and to accept without protest their exclusion if they do not and to keep still and quiet as the musicians play. They expect to be treated with courtesy and respect by the staff of the hall and will complain if they are not so treated. But there is a wider range of behaviors also: not to overdress vulgarly or wear cheap perfume, not to belong to unacceptable racial minorities, not to take too much alcohol or other drugs before the performance or in the interval, not to go to sleep and snore, not to belch or fart or breathe garlic in people’s faces, not to make improper sexual advances, not to pick their pockets or mug them.
In a word, a concert hall is a place where middle-class white people can feel safe together. In this respect its relationships resemble those of an ideal city as imagined by the sociologist Jane Jacobs (1961), which, she says, is a place where strangers can encounter one another in safety. But Jacobs envisages the possibility of an infinite variety of human meetings. What takes place in the concert hall is a narrow range of impersonal encounters among people of more or less the same social class, where each goes his or her own private way without being impinged on to any significant extent by others. It is, we might say, an ideal Westchester or Wimbledon rather than the untidy variety of a Brixton or a Lower East Side.
I remember a tiny and seemingly insignificant happening in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall that, for me, illustrates this feeling of safety. It was during the early 1970s, at a concert of avant-garde music, where the audience was mainly student, bohemian, and intellectual. The night was cold, and I was wearing a bulky sheepskin coat. Not wanting to wait in the long line for the cloakroom, I had the momentary thought that I could hang it in the gents’ washroom, that with this audience it would be safe there. Then I checked myself, remembering that middle-class intellectuals were just as likely as anyone else to knock off a nice sheepskin coat left hanging in the gents’ if they thought they could get away with it. But the thought had come so pat, so unbidden, that it could only have originated in that feeling of being among my own kind, strangers though they may have been to me. In the event I kept the coat on my lap, causing discomfort to myself and annoyance to my neighbors.
Above all, the members of the audience expect one another to respect scrupulously their privacy in the face of the musical experiences they are all undergoing. The aloneness of the individual during the performance is felt not as a deprivation but as the necessary condition for full enjoyment and understanding of the musical works being played. It is not that people do not socialize at a concert; they do, and the socializing is an important part of the event. But we have seen that that takes place in the foyer, before and in the interval of the concert, not in the auditorium. The two halves of the event are physically separated from each other, and the experience of the musical works themselves, the center of the night’s event, is a solitary one.
Orchestra and audience, too, are strangers to one another, and there is no opportunity for them to become anything else, for they enter and leave the building by separate doors, occupy separate parts of it, and never meet during the event. This seems to be felt more as a relief than a deprivation by both parties, who apparently treasure their separation and prefer not to enter into a relationship of familiarity with members of the other group. And on the other hand, the audience is expected to sit quietly and accept the orchestra’s performance as it plays, the only response open to its members being applause at the end. To boo at the end of a performance one has particularly disliked is possible, though a bit extreme. What is not an option is to make any visible or audible response, of either approval or disapproval, during the course of the performance; there is no way in which such a response could be incorporated as an element of the event, in the way that, for example, applause at the end of a solo is incorporated into jazz performance and is a legitimate element of it, or the response of the Jamaican audience I mention below.
The concert hall thus presents us in a clear and unambiguous way with a certain set of relationships, in which the autonomy and privacy of the individual is treasured, a stance of impersonal politeness and good manners is assumed, familiarity is rejected, and the performers and their performance, as long as it is going on, are not subject to the audience’s response. Because people who attend symphony concerts mostly go voluntarily, we can assume that they enjoy doing so; therefore, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that those relationships represent some kind of ideal in the minds of those taking part. I shall be discussing later the general proposition that how we relate is who we are. If that is so, then those taking part in this or any other musical event are, at some level of awareness, saying, to themselves, to one another and to anyone who may be taking notice, This is who we are.
The silence and apparent passivity of audiences at symphony concerts deserves a little more attention. Historically it is a recent practice. The eighteenth-century scene I described in the Rotunda at Ranelagh was by no means exceptional for the time. Aristocratic listeners of the time felt free to treat the musicians and the performance as background to their other activities, to listen attentively when they felt like it and to talk, eat and drink, and even make love when they did not. Why not? The musicians were their servants. In the Paris Opéra, says the historian James H. Johnson (1995), “gripping moments in the drama or especially renowned airs brought silence and genuine attention, but on the whole the Opéra in 1750 was a public setting for private salons, for which the music, dancers and machines provided an excellent backdrop.”
Mozart on his visit to Paris in July 1776, reported in a famous letter to his father his delight when the audience broke into applause during the performance of the symphony he had written for performance there and, perhaps even more significantly, said “Hush!” at the opening of the last movement, which Mozart, cocking a snook at noisy Parisian convention, had written for the violins only, pianissimo. Johnson tells us too that when, in the late 1820s, the symphonies of Beethoven attained a belated recognition with Paris audiences, spectators applauded particularly striking passages and erupted into storms of applause at the end of each movement, sometimes forcing its repetition, while at other times they “bubbled over with happy sighs and murmuring approval.” Such noises do not suggest inattention, and certainly not disrespect, but betoken rather an audience that is active rather than passive in its attention, that considers, in fact, that its own audible responses are a legitimate element of the performance.
The silence that will greet tonight’s performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude. Those who wish perfect communion with the composer through the performance can have it, uninterrupted by any noise that may signal the presence of other spectators. On the other hand, while our attention is without doubt active, it is detached; we no longer feel ourselves to be part of the performance but listen to it as it were from the outside. Any noise we might make would not be an element of the performance, as were the sighs and murmurs of the Parisian audience, but an interruption or distraction. I have even known the minute clinks and jingles of a female listener’s charm bracelet to put its wearer’s neighbor in a rage.
Who we are, then, is spectators rather than participants, and our silence during the performance is a sign of this condition, that we have nothing to contribute but our attention to the spectacle that has been arranged for us. We might go further and say that we are spectators at a spectacle that is not ours, that our relationship with those who are responsible for the production of the spectacle—the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, and those who make the arrangements for tonight’s concert—is that of consumers to producers, and our only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.
Other kinds of performance conjure