If you love music, but are never sure when is the “right time” to clap during concerts, or happen to be one of those snobs who ridicules people who clap at the “wrong time”, Alex Ross of The Rest is Noise fame has some thoughts for you and challenges to the so-called No-Applause Rule.

While I usually feel kind of bad for people who clap at the “wrong time” I always understand why they do: the music asked them to. I only give the maloika to people who incessantly wrestle with their cough drop wrappers during performances. HINT: if you must, unwrap them prior to your event and place them into a sandwich baggie, which can be virtually soundless due to the miracles of soft plastic.

Ross argues that by smothering audience enthusiasm with the No-Applause Rule, we may be putting the fear of God into already reluctant concert-goers and making the entire experience less fun and more intimidating. Furthermore, by imposing rules on when applause is acceptable, we may doing a disservice to the spirit of much of the music written that sonically begs for applause at the “wrong” times. Okay – he explains it a lot better.

The lecture at The Royal Philharmonic Society opens with,

Last fall, Barack Obama hosted an evening of classical music at the White House—once an unremarkable event, more recently something of a freak occurrence. Beforehand, he said, “Now, if any of you in the audience are newcomers to classical music, and aren’t sure when to applaud, don’t be nervous. Apparently, President Kennedy had the same problem. He and Jackie held several classical-music events here, and more than once he started applauding when he wasn’t supposed to. So the social secretary worked out a system where she’d signal him through a crack in the door to the cross-hall. Now, fortunately, I have Michelle to tell me when to applaud. The rest of you are on your own.”

Obama was having some fun at the expense of the No-Applause Rule, a central tenet of modern classical-music etiquette, which holds that one must refrain from clapping until all movements of a work have sounded. No aspect of the prevailing classical concert ritual seems to cause more puzzlement than this regulation. The problem isn’t that the No-Applause Rule is so terribly arcane that even a law professor turned commander-in-chief cannot master it.

Rather, it’s that the etiquette and the music sometimes work at cross purposes. When the average person hears this—

[EXAMPLE: End of third movement of Pathétique]

—his or her immediate instinct is to applaud. The music itself seems to demand it, even beg for it. The word “applause” comes from the instruction “Plaudite,” which appears at the end of Roman comedies, instructing the audience to clap.

Chords such as these are the musical equivalent of “Plaudite.” They almost mimic the action of putting one’s hands together, the orchestra being unified in a series of quick, percussive sounds.

So if President Kennedy—or President Obama, for that matter—ever clapped after the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, or the first movement of the “Emperor” Concerto, or in other “wrong” places, he was intuitively following instructions contained in the score. This explains why newcomers exhibit such anxiety on the subject; it even appears that fear of incorrect applause can inhibit people from attending concerts, although they may be merely inventing excuses. Children pose a particular problem. If you examine literature handed out by various music-education associations, you notice that the suppression of enthusiasm in children is a major concern. Program booklets sometimes contain a little list of rules rendered in the style of God on Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not applaud between movements of symphonies or other multisectional works listed on the program.” And it is often insisted that one may only applaud: “Appropriate applause is the only acceptable audible response from the audience.” One must make no other noise—for example, with one’s mouth.