How should audiences behave?
There's a great exchange of letters in yesterday's NYT reacting to Daniel Levitin's Sunday op-ed in which he advocates much more audience freedom at classical music concerts. His final paragraph:
"Music can be a more satisfying cerebral experience if we let it move us physically. When we hear a chord we like in works by Sibelius or Mahler, our brains want to shout out “Yeah!” When an orchestra builds the timbral mass in Ravel’s “Bolero,” we want to break out of our seats and dance and show how good it feels. Stand up, sit down, shout, let it all out. As the managers of Lincoln Center contemplate renovations, I say rip out some of the seats and give us room to move."
The letters are all over the map, from an orchestra violinist who would like concert halls to be more like open floored rock venues to a Mr. Snooty Pants type who thinks it's all about how much privacy he's entitled to at the concert because of how much he paid for his tickets.
While I empathize with Mr. Levitin (whose book about music and the brain I reviewed in an earlier post) to a degree, I think he's mostly wrong on this one...
