Coughingly Incorrect, or, Proof That There Are Two Sides to *Everything*
Full disclosure: As a professional audience member, I am as righteously
irked by noises as anyone. And yet, Jon Carroll here takes a position
which is as difficult to agree with as it is to ignore.
The Audience Talks Back
JON CARROLL/SF Chronicle
Wednesday, January 20, 1999
LATELY THERE HAS been much hoo-rah in the popular press about coughing
in concerts. Michael Tilson Thomas, it is said, glares at the offending
coughers, hoping perhaps to shame them into slinking away. Kurt Masur
of the New York Philharmonic actually stalked offstage in the middle of
a concert because he disapproved of the coughing level.
You'd think these maestros were professional golfers or something.
Programs passed out at serious-music concerts contain ever more lengthy
and stringent anti-coughing screeds. Rudeness is mentioned; lack of
self-control is noted; the idea is put forth that classical musicians
have the temperaments of Chihuahuas and may sometimes actually spit up
on the carpet if they hear a cough during a particularly tricky passage.
Now a writer for the New York Times has suggested that symphony
audiences should contain a higher percentage of amateur musicians.
Amateur musicians understand the wonders of music in a way that ordinary
mortals cannot, and therefore they would be loath to cough lest they
miss a particularly thrilling obbligato.
I rise today to defend the members of the audience. They are required
to drive to a remote location, where they can either pay $12 to park
in a presumably secure location or a lesser sum to park in a dark
lot surrounded by abandoned warehouses. Or they can take public
transportation and have big fun after the show waiting on the corner
or the platform with the entire cast of "Night of Living Dead."
(In Berkeley, a crackdown on parking aimed at cruising youth causes many
people to flee the concert hall just as the encores are getting under
way -- so very amusing.)
ONCE INSIDE, THEY pay extortionate prices to purchase $7.50 beverages
laden either with fruit juice or alcohol or both, to sit in seats that
are probably not ideally located, to listen to music of varying quality,
with no refunds offered if the soloist is in a snit.
They do it anyway, because they love music. With the exception of a
few see-and-be-seen openings and events, people would not go to all
that trouble were they not generally enthusiastic about serious music.
THIS JUST IN: Coughing is a reflex action. It is involuntary. It has
to do with clearing the esophagus of fluids that, were they allowed to
remain there, might pose a significant threat to respiration. Coughing
is not like talking or whistling or humming. It is nature's way of
helping us to breathe, for heaven's sake.
Yes, it is possible to some extent to control a cough. One can resist
the tickle, wait for it to get worse and worse, wait for the small panic
reaction to set in as the entire throat becomes clogged, wait until just
before unconsciousness before hacking, but the resulting explosion is
a lot louder, and more likely to expel germs into the air. Plus, the
person attempting to control a cough is in no wise enjoying the music
he or she just plunked down actual earned income to hear.
If you have a cold, probably you should be tucked down in your
jammies watching reruns of "Friends." But even healthy people cough
occasionally. It just happens. Everyone else seems to deal with it.
Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address with the sound of shovels and axes
digging graves clearly audible, and he managed to make it through the
speech without glaring at anybody -- and his was one human voice,
unaided by amplification. Despite the noise, he could be heard at the
very back of the crowd of 20,000 who stood in the sun to listen. Surely
humans equipped with noisemaking instruments could equal that feat in a
closed room with superior acoustics.
Have our instrumentalists and journalists grown so frail that they
cannot deal with a common human noise, a brief and inoffensive one at
that, usually muffled, unaccompanied by odor? Feh, I say, and fie
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