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