Admission, granted

I like concerts.  I like going to concerts.  I like them to the near-exclusion of recordings from my life. But I must admit that I'm not always a perfect concert-goer.  I have, for example,  yawned during a concert. Yawning is rude and distracting to both the performers and the audience.  I shouldn't yawn during a concert.  I have also fallen asleep during a concert*.  That should probably be avoided as well. During intermissions, I sometimes move to more expensive seats that have been vacated. And, of course, as a penurious student, I did steal my way into more than one concert. Sometimes whole concert series or festivals. On occasion, I have left concerts at intermission and — albeit with somewhat less frequency — I have departed the hall in the middle of a piece.  I have coughed, to be sure.  Also sneezed.  I have made crispy plastic noises while opening packages of mints or cough drops, trying to avoid coughing or sneezing. I have sat in squeaky chairs and been unable to stifle all sqeaks.  I have worn shoes that squeak. When suffering stress, my jar has been known to crack.  Not quietly. I have dropped programs, books, sun- and/or reading glasses, articles of clothing, backpacks, briefcases, picnic baskets,  canned beverages, and — but only once — a bentō box during concerts.  I have expressed displeasure by not clapping.  But for all that, I do not talk while music is being played during concerts and I do not have a mobile phone, pager, portable music player, or wristwatch with an alarm that might go off.  Nor have I ever worn clothing so distractive as to compete with the music for the audience's attention.  To be absolutely fair, most of the things I have dropped have fallen on cushioned chairs or carpeted floors.  And while yes, a fallen bentō box is indeed annoying, but a tiffin or a schoolchild's tin lunchbox or carkeys or a handful of cutlery would be that and more so! My cracking jaw is a legitimate medical condition.   And supressing a cough or sneeze is often a hell of a lot more distracting than actually having the damn cough or sneeze and getting on with it.  And, pardon me, but I have never booed, hissed, or demonstratively exited any performance that didn't really have it coming.

In fact, I'd say that altogether, I'm just about your perfect concert-goer.   

_____

* I have never fallen asleep in a work of Morton Feldman's, by the way.  But I have watched three men — my father, the late musicologist and philosopher Daniel Charles, and Feldman himself — all doze off during Feldman concerts.  Charles, a large man, snored loudly — if ironically — throughout a performance of Feldman's Piano, but somehow managed to wake, as if by some form of electric shock controlled by clockwork, promptly and impressively, given his gallic tonnage, at the piece's end, rising to his feet and shouting "bravo!"

 

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