In the social contract of performance, what happens when someone coughs? asks Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim.
I have a New Year’s resolution. Will you join me? This year I’m going to perfect the art of self-asphyxiation. It’s not pretty. But neither is the act of cough-bombing a performance during its most sublime pianissimo. And as I’m convulsing in my seat, eyes watering, my sleeve pressed to my purple face, I will focus on this consoling thought: At least I won’t be singled out and reprimanded by the performer onstage.
In November, the guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas dealt with a bronchial audience at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert by tossing cough lozenges into the crowd in between movements of Mahler’s Ninth. Earlier that month, after giving a marathon recital of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations to a reverentially silent Boston crowd, the pianist Andras Schiff stopped in the middle of his encore to scold an audience member who had coughed. “I am giving you a gift,” he told the embarrassed offender. “Don’t spoil it.” That’s also the message the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett relays to his audiences, only his exact words are not printable here.
In this anything-goes age, it seems as if coughing in concerts is fast becoming one of the last universally reviled forms of high-culture hooliganism. That vilification rests on the assumption that a person can control a cough, hold it in until a less exposed moment in the music, and, when all else fails, muffle it.
I have a New Year’s resolution. Will you join me? This year I’m going to perfect the art of self-asphyxiation. It’s not pretty. But neither is the act of cough-bombing a performance during its most sublime pianissimo. And as I’m convulsing in my seat, eyes watering, my sleeve pressed to my purple face, I will focus on this consoling thought: At least I won’t be singled out and reprimanded by the performer onstage.
In November, the guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas dealt with a bronchial audience at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert by tossing cough lozenges into the crowd in between movements of Mahler’s Ninth. Earlier that month, after giving a marathon recital of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations to a reverentially silent Boston crowd, the pianist Andras Schiff stopped in the middle of his encore to scold an audience member who had coughed. “I am giving you a gift,” he told the embarrassed offender. “Don’t spoil it.” That’s also the message the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett relays to his audiences, only his exact words are not printable here.
In this anything-goes age, it seems as if coughing in concerts is fast becoming one of the last universally reviled forms of high-culture hooliganism. That vilification rests on the assumption that a person can control a cough, hold it in until a less exposed moment in the music, and, when all else fails, muffle it.