Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.

Sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end.

If there were no rules about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.

We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.