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The Sound of Any Hands Clapping

I overhead an argument recently between two composers about whether or not to leave applause at the end of a live recording when sharing it on social media. The argument against doing so seemed to be that leaving the applause signaled a kind of desperation to show that the audience liked the piece and that their approval of the piece was important to you.

Taking the applause out showed that you were above such concerns and merely wanted to share a live performance of your music with people on the off chance that they had some extra time on their hands and were looking to fill it with unfamiliar music.

My own opinion is that you leave the applause in however long it takes for someone to yell woo! If no one yells woo then you leave the applause in but fade it immediately to hide the fact that the applause is perfunctory in nature and they didn’t really like your piece.

Getting applause is the easy part. I’ve never been to a concert where a piece didn’t get some applause, though of course I’ve sometimes had a sneaking suspicion that we were applauding the fact that the piece had finally ended.

But no one yells woo unless they mean it.  Woo just isn’t the kind of thing you yell willy-nilly.

In my early years I confess that I tried often to rig the system. I once wrote a piece with an ending calculated to elicit the maximum number of woos by giving everyone a trill with a big crescendo leading to a final crashing chord.  It worked and the woos rang throughout the hall.  But I felt cheapened by the experience rather than emboldened.

I’ve since rewritten that piece to end with twenty minutes of awkward silence during which half of the musicians are instructed to eat some kind of snack, ideally a Fruit Roll-Up, while the other half stare hungrily.  There are no longer woos though the piece does still get a polite smattering of applause.

Naturally I fade it down.

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