As I sit here writing, I’m trying to will myself to block out the repetitive thump of my upstairs neighbor’s music. I’m not going to lie; I’m a big, cranky wet blanket when it comes to noise. I was always taught by my mom to make sure that in shared spaces no noise I made disrupted those around me, and as I’ve gotten older (and more to the point, have lived in more apartments), I’ve found that my tolerance for noise has disintegrated as my craving for peace and quiet has intensified. So every night my neighbor decides to display his sweet new turntable and speaker system for the building, I find myself balefully glaring up at the ceiling, hoping that he’ll turn it down and bargaining with myself: do I face my fear of confrontation and ask him to turn it down so I can have a non-rattling ceiling, or does my fear of confrontation overpower my desire for silence?
Well, that’s an internal struggle that is not wholly unfamiliar to patrons of classical music the world over. In a profession that generates noise for a living (and this is why I have to be pushed the my very breaking point before I say anything to anyone about apartment noise…glass houses, you know) it’s strange that so many of us are so sensitive to noise. Or perhaps it isn’t–we take our music and our ability to listen to it carefully and intensely very seriously. We’re all familiar with the cast of noise-making characters in the concert hall: the man whose hearing aid is whining, the persistent cougher, the accidental cell phone offender, the cough drop unwrapper, the non-quiet whisperers, the know-it-all narrators, and–my absolute least favorites–the insiders who are sooo cool that everything that happens is an inside joke. My boyfriend and I sat in front of a pair of the last characters at a performance of Turandot at Seattle Opera this summer, and it was a pretty significant buzz-kill (sample from the evening: during Nessun Dorma, one of them said derisively, “That’s so Puccini.” They both cackled.) Neither of us said anything–we decided to go with the time-honored tradition of the dirty look. Some other audience members went with the equally classic “SHHHHH!”
When we think about noise in concerts, we all have stories like this–we’ve all been the quietly seething but non-confrontational patron who endures a great performance with less than stellar behavior from our fellow audience members. But we’ve all also been the offender every so often. We’ve gone to that can’t-miss concert with a cold and coughed miserably and not quietly enough into our elbows. I’ve even been that coughing girl on stage–once even having to halt a movement of Dvorak on a degree recital to have an uncontrollable coughing fit. Having been on that side of the issue, it’s easy to see how people can really mean no harm with the noise they create in the hall. But not everyone seems to share the ability to see both sides of the coin and extend sympathy to both parties: both those who need quiet and those who are accidentally violating it need a bit of compassion. Sadly, that is something that seems, like common courtesy, to be going to the dogs these days. A recent piece on The Arts Desk tells an upsetting story. The author, Alexandra Coghlan, had taken an acquaintance to the BBC Proms, and it was the young lady’s first time at the storied summer event. She was asthmatic and unable to stop her coughing. Long story short, several concert-goers felt it was their place to lecture her–even after she and the article’s author apologized and moved to distant seats–as to how she had “no place” at the concert, telling her to “get out.” One concert-goer even felt the need to call her–and forgive the language I quote here–“you dirty bitch.”
Concert etiquette has the ability to get people up in arms, and it is often those people who are most strident in imposing their rules of etiquette who violate the rules of common courtesy. In the realm of concert attendance, there must be a happy medium between the silently irate audience members who say nothing as patrons are being truly rude and the loudly abusive audience member who righteously slanders a young girl with a cough. The trouble is, people seem unable to discuss the matter without getting into a snit–just look at the stories told in the comments section of the original story. What, really, is the social contract to which we agree when we enter a concert hall with hundreds of our fellow listeners? The more you think about it, the murkier the issue becomes. It’s high time we find a way to have a productive dialogue about the issue and end the murk. What do you expect from your fellow listeners? What should they expect from you? How much noise is too much? When do you say something, and when do you let it slide? The are all questions that we really do need to hear answers from, because the concert-going experience is a communal experience. It is shared and not owned by any individual audience member, and there are, without a doubt, some reasonable and important unwritten laws when it comes to promoting a concert environment in which everyone can enjoy the music.
One thing is very clear, though–there is no place for such abject rudeness in a concert hall, or–let’s be really frank–anywhere in one’s social interactions. This is true for rude concert-goers for whom their own enjoyment of the concert is more important than the enjoyment others may ge (this means you, horrible people from my Turandot experience)t, and it is also true for rude concert-goers who act as concert-etiquette vigilantes (gentlemen from Coghlan’s article, you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves). Perhaps Coghlan says it best: “Watching young people from 35 nations playing harmoniously together only made it harder to conceive that a handful of adults from the UK couldn’t manage to put aside ego for a couple of hours and do the same.”
Let’s all get adult about this and take a minute to examine our own conduct in the concert hall and our expectations of our fellow concert-goers. Are they fair? Or do they permit us to do more than we permit others to do? I suggest that we all take a good long look at ourselves before we take it out on the person next to us. That being said, if they’re really, truly, in the wrong, stand up to them…but ever so politely. This is art we’re taking in, and let’s all remember that it’s nothing to start brawls over. Hopefully, we all have bigger fish to fry than that. Take a minute to put yourself in the offender’s shoes. Take my upstairs neighbor issue (or, as I like to call him, “Boom Boom Man”). A few nights ago, I finally had had it with the boom-booms, and, at 1 am, I went upstairs to go ask him to turn it down. I was pretty irate. I got outside his door, though, and I heard him excitedly telling his visiting friend all about his new turntable, and he and his friend were rhapsodizing about how cool the steel guitar sounded in his old blues recordings when played on the new system. I thought for a minute. This was a lonely guy with a white-bread, 9-to-5 job, and he’s staying up all night because he’s excited about music. I swallowed my ire and went back downstairs, and I remember to be more sympathetic every time the bass gets to me. It’s about understanding your fellow concert-goer’s intentions.
That, and I decided not to pitch a fuss since very shortly he’s going to get a nice robust earful of orchestral excerpts for cello every night until 10:30 or 11. I put up with him, and he puts up with me. You’d think a concert-hall full of adults could also use a little empathy to achieve the same thing.
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