Over the past year, Emanuel Ax has mused on the rituals and regulations of applause at concerts. His original blog post from November 14, 2008, plus a follow-up entry on applause at the opera on March 9, 2009, prompted responding columns in the Berkshire Eagle and the LA Times, and an ongoing online conversation involving classical music fans, students, journalists, and author William Weber (The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms).

Ax observes that many 1st movements build passion and end with a flourish precisely to elicit audience response, which was freely given in the 18th & 19th century concert halls, and laments stifling of spontaneous appreciation. "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."

How did the concert-going experience evolve?
Alex Ross, in his September 2008 column in the New Yorker, insightfully sums up recent scholarship. Ross charts the progress from performances as a backdrop for aristocratic socializing to the post-French Revolution middle class, for whom "attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum." More staid concert going etiquette enabled long-form and continuous musical structures, as well as timbral subtlety, while sacrificing overt displays of audience enthusiasm. At the same time, concert programming shifted its emphasis from variety and novelty to historically informed intellectual experience. "When the concert rite emerged in its perfected form, circa 1950, it seemed to elevate and to stifle the music in equal measure. Composers were empowered by the worshipfulness of the proceedings, but, generally, only if they were dead."

Ross neatly describes the dilemma of modern music performance: "The problem isn't that the modern way of giving concerts has grown hopelessly decrepit, as some say; it's that music has for too long been restricted to a single, almost universally duplicated format. If the idea is to treat composers as serious artists, then concerts must become significantly more flexible, in order to accommodate the myriad shapes of music of the past thousand years." Ax again brings in the audience as a solution to the ossified concert dynamic: "I think that if there were no "rules" about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always. Most composers trust their listeners to respond at the right time, and if we feel like expressing approval, we should be allowed to, ANYTIME! Just one favor - even if you don't like a concert of mine, please PLEASE applaud at the end anyway."