A frown of irritation flashed across Zubin Mehta's face and the eyes of several musicians in the Bavarian State Orchestra widened in surprise as the audience enthusiastically clapped between the first and second movements of Haydn's Trumpet Concerto. The audience was nothing if not consistent; it applauded loudly every time a movement concluded, right through to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Listening on the live YouTube stream, I winced but was not surprised - it was no different from behaviour (including ringing mobiles) from audiences in New Delhi at western classical music concerts.
The audience at Srinagar's Shalimar Bagh clearly did not know that clapping in between movements of a piece of music seriously disrupts musicians' concentration. But, honestly, it's silly to even think of feeling superior. More than anything, it was a stark reminder of the fact that western classical music concerts were thin on the ground in urban India. After all, cultural knowledge is a question of exposure too - and there can be many degrees of ignorance, as I can sheepishly remember.
For instance, the only reason I know not to clap at inappropriate times at such concerts is thanks partly to that splendid institution called the Calcutta School of Music (CSM). CSM was run by a group of heroically committed classical music lovers and teachers, who worked tirelessly, often with some of the local consulates, to organise regular concerts by foreign musicians. These concerts were mostly performed through two seasonal cycles: monsoon and winter. One of its leading lights was Dr Adi Gazder, a doctor by profession and a fine pianist in his own right.
By the 1980s, the audiences at these concerts had dwindled considerably, so we got to hear pretty decent performances of mostly chamber music from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin and so on, composers whose music became comfortingly familiar to us, in small auditoriums. (When Zubin Mehta came visiting in the mid-1980s, he had to perform at the Netaji Indoor Stadium, the only venue large enough to accommodate a full orchestra.)
Then, one day, CSM announced that it would host a performance by someone who was an exponent of the music of American composer John Cage. John Cage? Never heard of him. If only I had consulted my sister's copy of Larousse Encyclopaedia of Music (no Google in those days) in advance.
Anyway, the crowd arrived at the auditorium duly silked and perfumed - nothing was explicitly stated but everyone dressed formally for a CSM concert. A single grand piano stood on stage, its back open. After a while, a youngish bloke in tie and tails strode on, bowed to the audience and then approached the back of the piano. Some plinking and plunking sounds emerged, in between longish pauses. Ah, he was tuning the piano, we thought, though he was taking an awful long time about it.
After a while, the performer emerged from under the lid and bowed to us. We were seriously perturbed. Should we applaud this man for tuning the piano? We were terrified of being considered as ignorant as the American audience attending the famous Concert for Bangladesh, which clapped lustily after Ravi Shankar tuned his sitar. Then, bless his knowledgeable Parsi heart, Dr Gazder stepped into the breach and clapped loudly and the audience, relieved, followed suit.
Cage, as Larousse later informed me, was an avant-garde composer who encouraged performers to explore the range of musical instruments they played. He was also an exponent of some kind of structured silence - when musicians do nothing for some period during a composition to allow the audience to hear the sounds of its own environment (no problem in India, that). Or something to that effect (there's a Wikipedia entry on him now, in case anyone is interested).
At any rate, Cage was terribly trendy at the time. Maybe we should have vibed with this performer's music since Cage, apparently, was influenced by Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism. But most of us were probably too stolidly temporal and the musical equivalents of Muggles in this instance. In that setting we were not very different from many in the Shalimar Bagh audience, and would well have been exposed were it not for the redoubtable Dr Gazder.
After the opening number, the performer sat at the piano, this time in front of the keyboard, and for nearly an hour, we remained puzzled and slightly agonised auditors of an excruciating stream of atonal plunking interspersed with random silences. Our anxiety was: how would we know when a piece was over? When should we applaud? It was now that the depths of Dr Gazder's musical knowledge and understanding became evident. He seemed to know exactly when to clap. I don't know if he was ever aware of it but for the duration of that concert, Dr Gazder became our Fuhrer of Applause. As soon as the first crack of a clap left his hands, we would follow enthusiastically. Hell, we even clapped for an encore.
Nobody said much afterwards but the toy-boy husband of a member of the audience best expressed our feelings. Having been dragged to the concert as much for trophy display purposes as to imbibe some "culture", he bluntly told his elderly wife as the audience filed out: "I need a drink."
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