Culture and traditions

Holding Applause

Newcomers to orchestral concerts soon learn, sometimes from the disapproving glances of their neighbours, that one does not clap between the movements of a symphony. The rule is now observed so strictly that the pauses between movements are often filled with nothing louder than a scattering of coughs. Yet it would have puzzled many earlier audiences. In the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth, listeners often applauded after each movement, and composers' letters record audiences breaking into applause in the middle of one when a passage particularly pleased them, a response that some composers welcomed rather than resented. The expectation of silence took hold only gradually, over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The hush that strikes newcomers as so ancient is therefore not so much a timeless mark of respect for great music [1] a relatively recent convention, and one that some orchestras, anxious to attract new audiences, have begun quietly to relax.