Should we be silent in classical concerts? Alex Ross, the classical critic of the New Yorker and writer of the superb panorama of 20th Century music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, an “unlikely mass-market proposition” which has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic will be giving this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture. His talk is entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert and will be given on 8 March at the Wigmore Hall. In the lecture Alex Ross will address concert culture - what has changed since the 18th century and what can we take forward into the 21st?
Ross comments: “In the eighteenth century listeners often burst into applause while the music was playing, much as patrons in jazz clubs do today. The practice seems to have died out in the course of the nineteenth century, although audiences almost always applauded after movements of large-scale works.Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea took root that one should remain resolutely silent throughout a multi-movement piece. By imposing such a code,we may inadvertently be confining the enormous and diverse expressive energies that are contained within the classics of the repertory. The work itself should dictate our behaviour, not some hard-and-fast code of etiquette.”
Tickets, priced £10, can be booked on: 020 7935 2141; or at here.
The Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] is one of the two oldest music societies in the
world. It was formed on 24 January 1813 with the aim “to promote the performance, in
the most perfect manner possible of the best and most approved instrumental music.”
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Alex Ross talking about The Rest Is Noise
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