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Audience Etiquette - Teaching Grown-Ups How To Behave

Posted by Thomas J. West on October 1, 2011 at 8:40 AM

epic win cell phone bassoon

Some friends of mine on Facebook are passing this image from the infamous Failblog site around. It is, as this site has thrown into the internet vernacular "full of WIN".

As a music teacher of a performing ensemble, I have had the experience of an audience member disrupting the mood of the concert with behavior unbecoming a polite concert-goer. In my case it was a parent giving a "shout out" to their kid between movements of a multi-movement work.

In today's scholastic concert environment, the potential for disruptions from the audience are greater than ever. Cell phones, pagers, Nintendo DS games, and so on all can create distractions. Video cameras clogging the aisles filming music that is copyright protected is also a commonly accepted faux pas.

Many of today's adults, especially younger parents of elementary children, did not grow up attending live orchestra performances, musical theater events, or other live music venues that require concert etiquette. The closest many people come to this is attending a movie in a movie theater, where a certain level of respect is still demanded.

Depending on your school setting, you may or may not have to educate your population about the etiquette for concert attendance. A few suggestions:

Post etiquette in your concert program
Post signs at the auditorium doors to wait until a movement/piece has finished before entering
Announce strict policies from the mic (no video cameras, cell phones off)
Hold a demonstration where the ensemble performs a lyrical, sensitive moment in the piece and have a plant in the audience cough loudly or make a disruptive sound with their cell phone

Many adults just don't know better, or they don't consider a school concert to be important enough to be respectful during it. It is also common for the culture of a community to be unsupportive (or even diametrically opposed to) formality of any kind. In one of the rural settings I taught for, it was common for parents to come in greasy jeans and soiled baseball hats to concerts. We expect our students to dress the part and look professional for concerts. It may be up to you as a music educator to respecfully instruct and expect the same sort of respect from their parents.

Of course, fighting that fight may be a small matter in the grand scheme of things. I would place a higher priority on many other aspects of developing a school performing ensemble program and acquiesce to a bit of crudeness from the audience. As is true with any public school teaching position, the community that you serve is the ultimate determining factor of what is and is not perceived as important, relevant, and worth supporting. Learning what your community's boundaries are is an important part of teaching and something that most undergraduate programs in music education do not teach their pre-service teachers.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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