“The fact that applause was removed from recordings of live music suggests another factor in the transformation of the concert ritual: habits acquired through listening at home. Seated before the wireless or the gramophone, we grew accustomed to those brief bands of silence between movements. Perhaps this explains why resistance to the suppression of applause seemed to subside rather quickly in the thirties and forties.”

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Alex Ross just posted a PDF of a wonderful lecture on applause he gave at the Royal Philharmonic Society. If you’re interested in performance norms, public social discipline, or stories about Barack and Michelle, then you should read it. The social history of classical music performance is super interesting, especially for me in the ways it intersects with how people think of “live” music.

(via The Rest Is Noise)

I know that classical music isn’t usually the focus of this blog, but this video is too fun to not post. Conductor (and according to Google, motivational speaker) Itay Talgam describes the different kinds of relationships between conductors and orchestras, with a set of fantastic videos of various composers.

You’ve got a free 20 minutes, right?

(via Resources for studying sound recordings)

Bravo Gustavo is a new game from the LA Phil celebrating the start of Gustavo Dudamel’s term as conductor. It’s really two games: one is a browser game like a sort of orchestral Guitar Hero, the other is an iPhone game that lets you swing your phone around to “conduct” the orchestra (basically just advancing through a recorded track with every swing of the “baton”).

It is amazing that classical music is entering this space; the gameplay in the two games could use a little cleaning up, but they are extremely impressive efforts to see coming from an organization like the LA Phil.