If any one here has been to a concert or a play recently, you know the drill before the show starts, about silencing (or better yet, turning off) cell phones and other such communication devices, so that they don't go off during the event. Of course, such disruptions tend to happen with regularity anyway. It seems that the risk is higher during the second part of the show, after people have made calls, checked for messages, posted on FB, etc., during intermission, and then forgotten to re-silence their machines.
You may have read about a recent incident in NYC where an piece of electronic gadgetry managed to disrupt such a concert, and caused near internet-mayhem in the reaction to it, at least mayhem by classical music standards. Needless to say, the e-disruption happened at a particularly quiet moment in the work in question, Mahler's Symphony No. 9. More below the flip....
You can read about the incident from the blogosphere at many sites, but three will suffice:
(1) thousandfold echo (apparently first past the post on this)
(2) Paul Pelkonen, Superconductor blog entry
(3) Daniel J. Wakin, ArtsBeat blog entry, NYT
The sound was the iPhone marimba ringtone, and after it started, per thousandfold echo:
"....it kept on ringing, and ringing. Gilbert kept on conducting for a few bars, but unbelievably, the sound kept on going....
"Of all places, the offender was sitting in the very front row, center section, on the aisle (stage right). In other words, right in front of the concertmaster.
Finally, Gilbert dropped his hands and stopped the orchestra, turned to the offender, and looked at him. To everyone's disbelief, the sound just kept on going, and going. Someone shouted, 'Thousand dollar fine.'
Gilbert said something like, 'Are you finished?' The guy didn’t move a muscle. Gilbert: 'Fine. We’ll wait.' And he turned to the podium and lay down his baton.
As the marimba kept on clanging, someone shouted, 'Kick him out!' Another echoed. Some started to clap. But then others shushed the hall down, preventing pandemonium from erupting."
Per Pelkonen, continuing the story, Gilbert then said:
"I apologize. Usually, when there's a disturbance like this, it is best to ignore it, because addressing it is sometimes worse than the disturbance itself. But this was so egregious that I could not allow it. We'll start again."
Per Wakin, after a phone interview with Gilbert:
"Ringing cellphones are a common scourge of live performances, and indeed, most musicians soldier on."
However, per Gilbert:
"Usually it's not Mahler Nine you’re playing...and usually it’s not the most emotionally wrought part of Mahler Nine"
If you know Mahler 9 at all, in the last movement, that passage is in the last part of the finale, as the music just literally dies away, part of what Leonard Bernstein called, roughly paraphrasing, a "sonic presentation of death itself....which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it". Unfortunately, the "re-animation" took a most unfortunate form.
If I'd been there, in the same circumstances, I would have been one of the first ones to lose my cool at such an interruption. I've heard more than one of those electronic interruptions, though perhaps not quite so egregious, in my years of concert going. (No, it's never happened with me. Remember that 3CM is a loser with no friends who'd call him during a concert.) So the audience reaction at the time was very understandable.
However, with time, things calmed down a bit, and some people stood back to ask what the perpetrator had thought of all this. Wakin reported on this subsequently the next day in the NYT here, after talking with the audience member in question, referred to as "Patron X":
"....no one, it seems, felt worse than the culprit, who agreed to an interview on Thursday on condition that he not be identified — for obvious reasons.
'You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that......It's horrible, horrible.' The man said he had not slept in two days.
The man, called Patron X by the Philharmonic, said he was a lifelong classical music lover and 20-year subscriber to the orchestra who was friendly with several of its members. He said he himself was often irked by coughs, badly timed applause — and cellphone rings. 'Then God, there was I. Holy smokes,' he said.
'It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert.....I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.'"
"Patron X" spoke to Alan Gilbert personally to apologize, and Gilbert told Wakin that he responded to "Patron X" thus:
"'I'm really sorry you had to go through this,' and accepted his apology.'"
I think that there's no doubt that "Patron X" felt contrite and genuinely awful about what happened. It seems that some sort of automatic setting on the iPhone had the snowball effect:
"[Patron X] said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode."
I actually do have some additional advice for "Patron X", even though he won't see this: make sure to get new seats for future concerts, or better yet, a different seat for each concert. The fact that his seat location, in front of the concertmaster, has been publicized would make it comparatively less difficult for him to be traced. So it might be best perhaps to try out different real estate in the hall, if he's feeling sufficiently paranoid.
So this incident seems done, with apologies all around, and maybe scattered lessons "learned" by performing arts organizations, for now....until the next egregious e-disruption occurs. You know that it'll happen. With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol below, namely your loser stories for the week.....