Claire Kilroy was enjoying a civilised evening of classical music until rudely disturbed by a gang of elderly delinquents
We had an unpleasant encounter at a concert in The Helix one night, my mother and me. It was a lovely evening, almost. A young violinist was playing the Bruch concerto, and so impressive was her performance that the audience delivered a brisk applause after the adagio. The pleasure the violinist took in this response was visible.
Her whole body seemed to smile. She went on to complete the concerto with emotion and lyricism. The final applause which followed was enthusiastic and sustained.
As soon as she left the stage, there was a loud display of superior knowledge from the group seated around us. They were a party of eight, and occupied four seats behind us, and two on either side. My mother and I were thus enclosed in a pincer formation as this group discoursed over our heads. Apparently, we were quite wrong to have enjoyed the performance so much. The whole hall, in fact, was quite wrong. The concerto had been tedious, and by briefly applauding after the adagio, we had collectively made a holy show of ourselves.
"Peculiar things are happening," one of them noted in withering tones. "It must be because we're on the northside." "Perhaps we could give them lessons on how to behave," suggested his friend. The man beside my mother leaned into her. "Promise me you'll try not to clap between movements," he said.
When I was in Junior Infants, or Low Babies as we called it, we had ourselves an orchestra. Actually, now that I'm an expert, I see it was just a percussion section. The teacher every so often would take down a big box of tangled up instruments, and hand one to every child. There were triangles, sleigh bells, miniature cymbals, tambourines. I still remember the thrill, the fervour, the almost vomit-inducing anticipation of wondering which instrument you'd get. We watched that box like dogs watch tins of dog food. It was enough to make you wet your pants. When every child had received an "instrument," the teacher would stand at the top of the class, raise her hands like a conductor, and say, "Go!" And boy, we went at it, hammer and tongs, falling off our seats, limbs a blur of motion. At the end, the teacher stuck gold stars on our foreheads, and we went home in a state of utter satisfaction, emotional as well as artistic.
This was how Lord Byron felt after composing one of his epics: heroic, fully realised, spent. Sadly my music education, and the music education of pretty much every other kid I grew up with, ended there, at the age of four, in that small draughty schoolhouse with outdoor toilets.
The 1980s hit us with a big snow, and education thereafter was geared towards securing employment in a bitter economic environment. It was all Business Organisation, German, essays on emigration, Peig. As a generation facing bleak prospects and almost certain exportation, we would have benefited from exposure to something spirit-sustaining; something such as music appreciation, for instance. But the great Western art music tradition remained remote, not because we were thick, or deaf, or bereft of aesthetic sensibility, but because it was considered too great a luxury in a time of belt-tightening.
Which brings me back to that group in The Helix. Eight of them, probably sixty-somethings, engaged in a collective attempt to make a mother and daughter - and the denizens of northside Dublin in general - feel ashamed and small.
Promise me you'll try not to clap. (My mother and I couldn't even manage that much, such was our incompetence. We clapped so hard at the next opportunity that our hands nearly fell off our wrists.)
As it happened, I'd just sold a novel about a classical violinist to Faber & Faber that week; I knew how to behave. With intimate chamber music, clapping can easily disturb the overall effect of the work. Greet an operatic aria with silence, however, and you're saying it was no good. A clipped applause between movements of a concerto is acceptable if the performance is exceptional. But even if the audience was entirely wrong that night, was the crime so awful? Were we clicking our fingers and singing along? Waving lighters in the air? Chatting away on mobile phones? Moshing? Directing abusive comments at the people seated next to us?
The real risk with an encounter of this nature is that, had it happened a number of years earlier, my mother and I might never have attended another concert. We might have said, "Classical music is elitist, QED." It is certain we'd have left the concert hall in a state of upset, aware we'd committed some enormous faux pas, the precise nature of which evaded us.
The spirit of classical music has everything to do with the exhilaration of being in the Low Babies Orchestra, and nothing to do with the impulse to fold your arms and sneer. The musicians are driven by a tremendous passion.
They want you to come and listen, and they like it when you clap. It is not the practitioners who erect walls of smug exclusivity, but the minority who would retain it as an elitist entertainment, and use it as a tool to bully others. The National Symphony Orchestra closed its 2005-2006 season with the same soloist, this time playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D. She delivered another spectacular performance. And what did the audience at the National Concert Hall do in between movements? Sit on their hands murmuring that it was tedious? No, not a bit of it. They clapped.
•Tenderwire, Claire Kilroy's second novel, is published by Faber & Faber £10.99
, Claire Kilroy's second novel, is published by Faber & Faber £10.99