Make a joyful noise

Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will

Manny Ax is my new hero.

The eminent pianist has challenged a sacred rule that an audience must follow, on pain of death, while listening to an orchestra play classical music. The one that says never applaud between movements. Never, ever, ever. As in, don't even think about it.

Most neophytes instinctively clap at the end of a movement they like before they learn better. And why not? The music was glorious and they want to reward the orchestra and/or performer. It is a visceral, immediate response that Ax finds as natural as it is commendable. But then the clappers never clap that way again. Why?

Because they're treated like Ebola carriers when they do. No one else in the hall applauds. It's like clapping in the middle of an ocean. You are a tiny, low-rent atoll in a sea of alleged sophisticates. You cringe and think of the ad for Southwest Airlines that asks someone who has just made an egregious no-no, "Wanna get away?"

Humiliation, quite simply, is the rite of passage to gain admission into the Grand Order of Aesthetes.

(My favorite story comes from a friend in D.C. who in his youth had been a page-turner for a concert pianist. He started clapping at the end of a movement. No one else did. Said pianist stared at him. The audience stared at him. He had nowhere to hide. He was on stage, frozen in the spotlight like a butterfly on a pin. Imagine.)

Emanuel Ax wants none of this. "I'm leading a one-man crusade as a listener to start applauding," he says.

Ax simply finds the silence diktat silly. "We should welcome applause whenever it comes," he writes in his blog. "And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

"I am always taken aback when I hear the first movement of a concerto which is supposed to be full of excitement, passion and virtuoso display [like the Brahms or Beethoven concertos], and then hear a rustling of clothing, punctuated by a few coughs; the sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction. . . . If we feel like expressing approval, we should be allowed to, ANYTIME!"

Atta boy, Manny.

He adds, "Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end."

Mark Volpe, general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, agrees there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra's goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.

So how did this rule come into being? And who is the culprit behind it? "I've talked to many distinguished musicologists and none of them can figure out who's responsible," says Ax, who has studied the subject extensively.

But he has a suspect - Richard Wagner, the brilliant, screamingly anti-Semitic, 19th-century German composer and conductor. The imperious Wagner came up with yet another one of those unpronounceable, unspellable German humdingers - "gesamptkunstwerk" - which means something along the lines of "the total work of art."

According to gesamptkunstwerk, audiences can only appreciate the totality of his work by remaining as mute as dormice until the whole shebang is over.

"This is an old, old argument," says the conductor André Previn about the applause wars. "There's nothing wrong with it unless it becomes habitual. It's like standing ovations. You get them if the music is not absolutely lousy."

"It could bother me if it impinges on the mood of a piece," Previn adds. "If you clapped after the long Bruckner adagio, you'd be in big trouble. But would clapping between movements in general bother me as a conductor? No."

Previn points out that in opera, applause after a strong aria is standard. And in jazz, as my friend Charlie notes, listeners routinely applaud during the music after a player ends a great riff.

"This is about the trappings of music, not the music," says Ax of the Edict of Silence. "I think that if there were no 'rules' about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always."

He says people are beginning to applaud more between movements. He attends many concerts and, as a listener, applauds at will with his head held high.

So listen up: the ball is in our court. Listeners must summon the gumption to applaud without wilting. But they also need cover from the stage to do so. There is a symbiotic relationship between performer and listener, says Ax, and each side needs to help the other.

Ax is always supportive when clappers make noise: "I immediately turn to the audience and bow. We need to show we are responding to what the audiences are doing. I'm hoping it happens more and more." My man.

For the record, Manny Ax is not pushing a carnival agenda. Veteran listeners at BSO concerts will always enjoy their silence between movements as a matter of custom and as a moment to digest what they've just heard.

But they need to accommodate those who applaud from their hearts after a movement. As Republicans like to claim, it's a big tent. And it is time to loosen the strictures on how we listen to live classical music. Ax's crusade is a splendid one. On with the revolution: Liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.