“My Music Rules,” arguably the best episode of the animated children’s drama Arthur, sees the titular third-grade aardvark at odds with his little sister, D.W. For the musical guest at an upcoming community event, Arthur has moved to book saxophonist Joshua Redman, while D.W. has invited cellist Yo-Yo Ma. As they argue passionate cases for their choice musicians, Arthur tells his sister that she doesn’t know anything about music. D.W., not one to take anything lying down, retorts with this zinger: “You wouldn’t even know when to clap at a classical concert.” Game, blouses.

The concert hall, like a visit to your in-laws or your Facebook profile, is a performative space. Not just for the musicians, but the audience, too. There are commandments that govern listener conduct. And the greatest of these? You. Do. Not. Clap. Between. Movements.

But why?

Alex Ross, who feels it’s time to rethink this code, laid bare his feelings on the matter during a 2010 lecture at the Royal Philharmonic Society. In the process, he gave some perspective on how we got to this non-clapping business.

For a good chunk of music history, bursts of applause during a piece were expected. Bach literally played coffee house concerts. 

Mozart was so excited by the audience applause during his Paris Symphony that he went out for some celebratory ice cream. Basically, applause during a piece meant the audience was really feeling the music. And if they weren’t clapping, the composer might have freaked out. Brahms would know — he took the silence during a peformance of his First Piano Concerto to mean it was a dud, and he wasn’t wrong.

Ross doesn’t ask you to blame composers like Mendelssohn and Schumann for your concert woes, but you can point to both of them as early figures who began to expect audience behavior to keep up with the changing music of the Romantic era. Mendelssohn specified his Scottish Symphony be played without breaks to avoid applause. 

Schumann took a harsher tack:

“I have dreamed of organizing concerts for the deaf and dumb, that you might learn from them how to behave yourselves at concerts, especially when they are very beautiful. You should be turned to stone pagodas.”

 

Wagner is another notable composer who set a precedent for audience, but he did it by accident. The year was 1882, and Parsifal was getting ready to make its debut at Bayreuth. In order to preserve the serious mood set by the opera, Wagner told the audience there would be no curtain calls. The audience, confused by this strange news, thought that meant there should be no applause at all. So when the end of the opera was met with silence, the composer had to tell the audience it was cool to smack their hands together. But that didn’t make it any less weird. The confusion continued throughout early performances; audience members would hush early clappers. At one performance, after a silence following the Flower Maidens scene, Wagner himself tried to get the applause going. “Bravo!” he yelled, from a discrete location in the theater. The audience shut him up good.

By the 20th century, Ross notes, the concert hall — much like the church before it — was undergoing a reformation of sorts. And, like the church, it was to become a place of reverential silence. German critics led the charge, wishing that, among other things, orchestras remain behind a screen and the audience hold its applause. Big-name conductors like Toscanini and Stokowski also joined the ranks of hold-your-enthusiasm fans. And in America, it was spreading like crazy.

According to Ross, the early-20th-century American concert hall was undergoing a major change:

Members of the upper and middle classes embraced the symphony orchestra as a faux-European bastion in a world of vulgar commerce … The orchestra became the pride of the upper crust and the chief beneficiary of its largesse. In the face of a rising popular culture, the concert hall was remade as a refuge — a vale far from the madding crowd. The dying out of applause may be considered one marker of that evolution.

So, the concert hall became a retreat from the commoners. It’s not pretty, but this idea falls into line with a historical need for seemingly all things American “high” culture to be in someway validated by European trends. Ross goes on to quote Arthur Rubinstein, who blamed the silence in the concert hall on “an American inferiority complex.”

Even as late as the 1950s conductors and critics were pushing back against this new, silent social norm. Pierre Monteaux called the lack of applause between movements “artificial restraint.” Rubinstein said it was “barbaric” to dictate when one should and shouldn’t applause. Ross was even so kind to point us to Emanuel Ax’s personal blog, who in 2008 wrote, “I really hope we can go back to the feeling that applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.”

We should note that things are a bit different in the opera world. While it isn’t encouraged that concert goers get rowdy, we still clap after amazingly beautiful arias and choruses. In fact, you can watch some audience interaction in the middle of an opera, from this 2011 performance of Nabucco. After a lengthy applause following “Va pensiero,” conductor Riccardo Muti was moved to speak to the audience about the importance of Italian culture and preservation of art. And then, he conducted the chorus once more, with the audience joining in. It’s quite a thing to behold.

Selective applause in the concert hall is a fairly recent development. And while some composers may have been in favor of it, it seems to be born of the demands some critics and privileged patrons, with the rest of us following suit. It’s how any other social norm works. But like other social norms, it is subject to change. Who knows whether or not we’ll be holding applause until the end of a work in 40 years? Music, its critics and performance are constantly changing — in some opinions for better, and in others, for worse.

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