Please Hold Your Applause. Or Don’t.

At the Bay-Atlantic Symphony, the topic of applauding and when (not whether!) to do it has been raised with increasing frequency by our audience members. Some of our audience members are frustrated by people applauding at the “wrong” time.
I have opted to accept the enthusiasm and not to worry much about the etiquette, which is, after all, specific to our time, and to this art form. For readers not familiar with classical music, most big works usually have three (concertos) or four (symphonies) free-standing “movements” that come to a full stop and sound complete in and of themselves. It is a natural tendency to applaud at the close of a movement, very much as people do at the end of an act of a play.
A couple weeks ago, National Public Radio’s ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ aired an hour-long discussion on audiences of today and tomorrow; applause became something of a symbol for the state of flux of classical music. One of the guests, acclaimed New York pianist Orli Shaham actually loves spontaneous audience applause. She would be delighted, right when she executes a difficult passage, for audiences to cheer her the way they would a figure skater, a ballerina, an opera diva, or a jazz musician. She is going to an extreme in wanting applause even while the music is being played and not just between movements.
A piece by Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune (May 29, 2012) suggests that there are even conventional exceptions to the non-applause tradition. For instance, at the close of the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, it is very common among audiences who “know better,” to clap––because how can you not?
In fact, up through at least the late 1800’s it was expected for audiences to clap between movements, and curiously, the tendency not to applaud may have evolved later than we think. One can readily find a YouTube clip of a live performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto in 1935 at the New York Philharmonic, with Jascha Heifetz and and Toscanini conducting. The audience applauds between movements.
When I want to – when I feel it serves the flow or dramatic tension of the music – I can hold the silence, with a clear, “something’s about to happen” gesture between movements. The fact that the audience is resisting their urge to applaud makes the silence between movements even more palpable and electric.
One of my goals is to encourage people’s emotional response to an art form they are just getting to know; I certainly appreciate so many new listeners we have won over and their unbridled excitement for this music. I want them to feel close to it, to celebrate it with a spirit of abandon. If someone showed up with a present for my birthday, mistakenly a week early, I would not tell them to go away. Rather, I would say, “Thank you very much. I hope you can come next week, again (!) when we celebrate on the day of.”
Jed Gaylin is Music Director of Bay-Atlantic Symphony, which summers in Avalon. He is also Artist in Residence at Stockton College, Music Director of Johns Hopkins Symphony, and Music Director of Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra in West Virginia. You can next hear Bay-Atlantic Symphony in their Annual Pops Gala at the Borgata on Sept. 20, 8 p.m. – Broadway A-Z. For more information visit www.bayatlanticsymphony.org.