Klarinet Archive - Posting 000247.txt from 1999/07

From: John Dablin <johnd@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: APPLAUSE
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 18:10:28 -0400

To get back to Avrahm Galper's original post:-
> Applause This was taken from this mornings' newspaper
>
> In 1997 when the Vienna Philharmonic played in OrangeCounty, California,
> the audience shocked the European musicians by applauding after each
> movement.
> Conductor Daniel Barenboim took revenge by refusing to play an encore.
>
When I was young and knew everything, I too felt like this, and would
feel so superior to people who didn't know not to clap between
movements. However, since then I've changed my mind. Which is better,
an audience which "knows the form", has heard the music a dozen times
before and is probably bored, and may even be at the concert just
because it's the thing to do, or an audience that is hearing the music
perhaps for the first time and is clapping out of sheer enthusiasm from
their response to the music? I know which I would prefer.
Unfortunately it's a narrow line between the latter audience and the
kind where making a noise is simply a different form of showing off.
The London Proms are particularly prone to attract the latter, there
sometimes seems to be a competition to see who can get the loudest
"hurrah" in first after the final cadence (which is actually another
form of snobbery, because it shows you know when the music finishes, to
the millisecond).

However, great music is a spiritual experience, but not necessarily a
religious one. In a way, applause is a contribution to the whole
experience, a way of sharing the listener's response with the
performers. Let's have more of it I say, if it's genuine and
spontaneous.

... no prizes for guessing which conductor I would have voted for if I
were a member of the Berlin Philharmonic :-)
--
John Dablin
Aylesbury UK

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