The Fredösphere

Paul Horsley of Kansas City has lost his patience with audience noise.  I am going to adopt a new policy:  audiences will be banned from all future performances of my work.  Assuming there are any.

Here's a whole wonderful list of audience noise complaints.  Here's a bad one:

I was at a performance by the incomparable Evelyn Glennie with the Pittsburgh Symphony earlier this year. Ms. Glennie was performing a long (30+ minutes, I think), rapturous percussion piece which began and ended with her playing very quietly on a woodblock. Just as she struck the block with her final pianissimo note, the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th rang out, loud and clear from a cell phone in the orchestra section (we heard it clearly in the balcony).

It reminds me of a cell phone that accompanied Jesus' death in a performance of the St. Matthew Passion I saw once.  And I once observed a monk take a call right while assisting in a Buddhist funeral.

But then there are problems with overzealous shushers, like this one:

By far the weirdest experience I've ever had along these lines was a month or so ago, when a young woman snarked at my friend and I for laughing during the "Like A Virgin" sequence in "Moulin Rouge." Apparently she was a Madonna purist? We weren't coughing up bits of projective popcorn or weeping into her mullet or anything, we were just... laughing. I'm still flabbergasted over that one.