Donald Satz wrote:

>...The way I look at it, when the highlight is the comings and goings
>of other audience members, it's time to stay home, acquire the best
>audio equipment that can be afforded, and enjoy the music.

Actually, I find this thread sort of sad and disturbing.  Yes, there are
lots of distractions in the concert hall, but there always have been, it is
certainly better now than in Beethoven's day when people came and went, ate
their dinners, shouted insults or praise at the performers when it moved
them, and applauded vociferously between movements, even demanding that
movements be repeated in concerts.  Compared to that cacophany a little
candy wrapper doesn't seem so bad.  The sad thing is that in demanding
total silence at live concerts, proposing bans of performances of Mahler 9,
and staying away and listening to our cd's when we don't get the silence
we desire, we hurt the very beast we love so much, the very continuity of
the live classical concert.  Orchestras and opera houses and chamber groups
desperately need fannys to be in seats.  By harrumphing at the vile manners
of the masses and staying home in disgust, we just contribute to one more
orchestra folding or reducing it's season, one more chamber group finding
it impossible to get bookings for concerts, one more hall being turned
into a multiplex cine.  Keep going to concerts, everybody.  If the candy
wrappers bother you, wear earplugs!  No...that wouldn't work, would it...

Why is it, though, that these people insist on opening candies during the
softest points in the performance? I am of the theory that it is a vast
conspiracy of CM-haters who pay these little old ladies to unwrap candies,
they provide the candy with the acoustically-tested extra-loud wrappers and
offer free training courses in how to unwrap lemon drops in the slowest way
possible, they even provide the free bad perfume that wafts over entire
sections of the audience, and study scores to find the most poignant bars
in which to disturb the performance.

Dave Runnion