Before the Music Ends

The playing has already stopped, yet the sound may still be decaying. An extremely faint tail sound draws close to the hall’s existing noise; its pitch is still discernible, but its texture is thinning little by little. It has no clear boundary: it will not be wholly present in one instant and neatly return to zero in the next, but only gradually lose its outline until the ear can no longer catch hold of it. When the first clap sounds, it is still there; the attack of the clap is steeper and its volume higher, and it quickly occupies the ear. A second, a third follows, the dispersed sound of palms joining into one field. The original sound has not necessarily disappeared, but it is now hard to distinguish within it. This kind of masking need not wait until the whole hall responds in unison. One or two claps close to the ear are already enough to raise the background; the denser the applause, the harder it becomes to separate the residue from the new sound field. Applause is often treated as a response after the music has ended, but the sequence encountered by the ear is not always so orderly: the act of performance has stopped, while the sound waves remain in the room; the response has begun, while the thing being responded to has not yet fully withdrawn. Once the applause falls away, even silence cannot rewind those few seconds. That portion of sound will not return.

A live recording by the Vienna Philharmonic in January 1938 left another kind of sequence for later. The recording engineer’s note records that there was applause after every movement that night, yet the released version did not preserve these sounds. In the version that can be played again and again, one movement ends, and playback then continues from the next. At the scene, the order was: the orchestra stopped, the audience responded, the next movement began. After release, the listener receives a different sequence. The disappearance of the applause did not happen before the audience, nor did it make the hall of that night quiet again. Only after the performance had already passed did it allow the same point of transition to return repeatedly in another sound. Removing applause from the recording can make adjacent movements meet more cleanly, but it does not perform a new decay on behalf of any tail sound that was covered over. What it arranges is how people later listen again, not how things had previously occurred. The heat of the live scene does not automatically equal completeness, and the continuity of the released version is not the live performance gaining a second chance.

Yet this is still not enough to push applause uniformly outside the music. A letter from 1778 writes that, at a performance in Paris, the final movement first had two violins softly play eight measures. The composer expected that the forte after those eight measures would provoke a response; the audience’s response had already entered his estimation of those few seconds of live time. The very soft opening first made the room draw in, and the sudden arrival of the full orchestra changed it again. To hear this burst of applause merely as a lack of patience would miss the quiet that had already occurred before it; to praise it as a freer old etiquette would also forget that such freedom could cover tail sounds that had not yet disappeared. The two live scenes do not form a single history moving from noise toward solemn silence, nor do they need to defend each other. What the letter leaves behind is a very brief change of action. The sound of the two violins was very soft, and the audience asked one another to be quiet. After eight measures, the full orchestra entered. Applause sounded.