Talk:List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response

Antheil

The main page for Ballet Mecanique doesn't contain any reference to a riot; in fact, it describes the premiere as being in 1924, not 1923. One of these pages should be changed.

Yes, after closer inspection, very few of these articles listed here contain any reference to the supposed riots at their premiere, which earned them inclusion on this page. I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't an article that would be better off deleted or severely altered.Trumpetrep (talk) 01:45, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Reich

By this article's definition, the premiere of Four Organs cannot be considered riotous, as there was no violence. All Schonberg describes in his review are "yells for the music to stop...applause to hasten the end of the piece...lusty boos...screamed approval". He never once describes the incident as a riot, instead he simply calls it "some excitement".

The standard for the usage of the word "riot" has always been woefully haphazard in artistic circles, but even by the loosest meaning of the word, as well as the stated definition of this article, it simply does not apply to Reich's premiere.Trumpetrep (talk) 01:07, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

In response to the first removal of Four Organs, someone restored it to the list with two citations. The first is a dead link. The second is an interview where the audience is described as trying to stop the performance by booing. That is not a riot, even by the looser definition provided on this page. If Four Organs is to be included, the definition of a classical music riot should be changed to reflect the tame behavior of Reich's audience.Trumpetrep (talk) 22:06, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Removed "Riots"

• 1913 - Sergei Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No. 2
• 1926 – Béla Bartók – The Miraculous Mandarin (ballet)
• 1973 – Steve Reich – Four Organs

Perhaps the definition of a classical music riot should be toned down to apply to premieres like The Miraculous Mandarin and Four Organs, where there was no violence. I have archived these entries here, because they are well-sourced, but these pieces clearly never caused riots as defined on this page.Trumpetrep (talk) 22:06, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

These have been restored to the list, now that the page has been renamed.Trumpetrep (talk) 16:01, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

I was looking for Shoenberg's Chamber Symphony, but that was not on the list.Beethoven's 9th should be on as well and loads more.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.113.244.1 (talk) 09:47, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

By all means, add them!Trumpetrep (talk) 00:57, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Nomination for Deletion

It's been a year since I suggested deleting this undersourced and vague article. Its definition of a riot is unmet by most of the pieces that people have listed here. It seems better to assign a category to these pieces, which makes note of their rocky premieres. Since this article, over its 10-year history, has failed to prove the need for its own existence, it should go.Trumpetrep (talk) 21:28, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

The consensus was to keep this article and fix it. The new name errs on the side of inclusion, as the word "riot" did not apply to most of the pieces on this list even with a very loose definition of the word. Rather than exclude all the pieces that people have wanted to see on this list, the article was renamed with a looser standard of "unruly audience response". The word "hostile", which was suggested by one citation, implies a motive that is not always accurate. Either word opens up the possibility that this article will become a phone book. There is no end to the amount of pieces that could justifiably end up here. Nevertheless, the decision was to keep the article and improve it, and this is better than misapplying a label which does not fit.Trumpetrep (talk) 16:09, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Removed Items

• 1905 – Richard Strauss – Salome (particularly the 1907 Metropolitan Opera production in New York)

This type of reaction is really a separate phenomenon than the one this page deals with. Salome was cancelled by the Met after one performance due to the objections of JP Morgan's daughter. It received a rave review in the Times, and it was not marked by any kind of disturbance that concerns this page. Elsewhere, it was met with similar prohibitions against performing it, but again, that's something different from a hostile audience response to the work itself. Is there a page for banned or censored works? There's no shortage of those.Trumpetrep (talk) 03:32, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Why not "List of classical music riots and [fill in the blank]?

Since the phrase "classical music riot" is so well known, even if most such events don't rise to the level of a full blown "riot", why not go back to the old title and add something weaker after "riot"? Among other things, "unruly audience", while strictly accurate, also doesn't really doesn't capture the nature of a lot of these events. Hga (talk) 23:52, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Please read the edit history and the delete discussion for this article for context. Without rehashing it all here, the short answer is because the vast majority of the pieces on this list were not accompanied by riots. There are 14 pieces listed, only one piece was adjacent to actual, bonafide rioting (Auber), which had nothing to do with the piece itself, but the politics of Brussels in 1830. There are 2 pieces (Berg/Stravinsky) with documented exchanges of fisticuffs in the hall, but that does not rise to the level of a riot by any definition. There are two more pieces with fisticuffs exchanged after the concert (Varese/Antheil) outside of the hall, or on the way out, and neither could be considered a genuine riot.

If an absurdly loose definition of a "riot" were applied, then you would be able to hold onto these 5 pieces, and 9 others would have to go. The vast majority of these events are characterized by "unruly" behavior: unfurling of banners, catcalls, booing, tossing junk at the stage. That's the most accurate label, and it doesn't make sense to mislabel an article just because the label is familiar to people. It'd be a bit like titling the "Facial tissue" article "Kleenex", since that's the label most people know.

And that's the real problem here. "Classical music riot" is only a well known term because it's been so widely misapplied. No self-respecting musicologist would repeat the long-held myth that the modern music in The Rite of Spring provoked spontaneous outbreaks of violence, because it was always untrue and no secret at that. Most of the tales from that night are apocryphal, and only the wildest fabulists (like Jonah Lehrer) conflate everything that happened into a "riot". So, if the seminal "classical music riot" wasn't a riot at all, what use is the term?Trumpetrep (talk) 00:44, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I'll leave it to the Wikilawyers to label what you're doing, but it's clear your disdain of "riot" in this context is an original synthesis that is as inaccurate as labeling all these events as "unruly audience responses". It is not shared by the people who catalog these events (thankfully the people who try to look up "classical music riot" will find this page), and I believe it is entirely unuseful. As for your advice to read the edit history and deletion discussion, I have, and contributed to the latter. My problem is that I don't agree with your original synthesis, not that I'm ignorant of it. Hga (talk) 13:32, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

You've read the discussions and the edit histories, and now, I'd encourage you to read the actual sources that I've provided on this page. Look up Harold Schonberg's review of Four Organs, or the program notes for Prokofiev. You won't find the word "riot" anywhere, nor any riotous behavior on display. In our delete discussion, the issue came up of whether to include or exclude things from Wikipedia. The consensus seemed to be that it is better to include these pieces, rather than exclude them.

On the Talk page, you'll see that's been my practice since I first started paying attention to this page. Instead of just deleting things outright, it seemed better to archive them, because it was clear people wanted to make note of the reactions these pieces caused. The problem becomes when you try to define that reaction. The "riot" definition that was on this page was inaccurate for most of the pieces on this list. That did not take any synthesis or original research to conclude. That simply required clicking through to the citations that were already on the page!

In the interests of inclusion, I restored entries to this list and built up each entry with citations and a description of what happened. People are free to examine this information for themselves, but just because the Wikipedia editors who have taken an interest in this topic have a fondness for the word "riot" is not a justification for keeping such an inaccurate term. If you are interested, take a look at the Talk page for The Rite of Spring, and you'll see how this issue has been debated elsewhere on Wikipedia.

Again, in the interests of inclusion, I have no problem with an article, a section, or a paragraph about the usage history of the term "classical music riot". That doesn't solve the paradox of this page, however. If you want to apply the word "riot", it gets reduced by 2/3rds. In the past, that solution has never pleased people who wanted to see Prokofiev listed next to Stravinsky. Your solution, of simply calling them all "riots", rewrites history and documentary evidence. So, here we are again, and I hope you can better understand now why this compromise emerged. Trumpetrep (talk) 14:19, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

"Your solution, of simply calling them all "riots", rewrites history and documentary evidence."

If that was indeed my solution, you might have a point. But since my solution is to change the title of this page to "... riots ['and' or 'to' or whatever] [something much more moderate, like 'unruly audience response']", to encompass everything from the undeniable riots, like, you know, the very first entry in the list, to the notable unruly audience responses, your comments do not address my proposal. When someone searches for the well known phrase "classical music riot", however distasteful you find it, and comes to a page that transmutes "riot", again, with the first item undeniably describing rioting leading to a revolution and the creation of an important, independent nation, into the silly in isolation "unruly audience response", they're going to wonder what's up. I don't object to Wikipedia incorporating humor and otherwise making people laugh, but this is not the way to do that. Hga (talk) 14:51, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Now who is conducting his own original synthesis? Again, I would refer you to the cited sources. Sonia Slatin's article is a definitive analysis of what happened in Brussels, and there simply was no riot at the opera that night. There was a lot of cheering and an early exit to join a riot that was already underway, which was planned by rebels, and which had nothing to do with the opera. To suggest that the opera provoked a riot that sparked a revolution misstates facts.

I already demonstrated why your solution is a non-starter. You'd be titling a page after a minority of its inhabitants. That's a bad idea. That's like having an article titled "Perfect Games in Baseball and other games where a pitcher did really well". There's no workable solution around what you've proposed. Leading with the term "classical music riot" misstates what's actually in the page.Trumpetrep (talk) 15:13, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I really don't understand the objections to the word "riot", when the entries are described as such by highly authoritative sources, such as the Britannica (eg Nono's Intolleranza [1]) and The Oxford Dictionary of Music (eg Boito's Mefistofele [2]). The current page name (List of classical music with an unruly audience response), which seems to me unnecessarily long-winded, implies a much broader (and, imo, scarcely definable) scope, fundamentally changing the focus of the list. For example, the première of Stockhausen's Trans elicited an "unruly audience response" [3] which is (afaik) not usually referred to as a "riot". So that should surely go in under the current page name... Indeed, where to stop?

Imo, the 'Riot' list had real encyclopaedic sense as a relatively brief catalogue of events of real historical interest. The current page name dilutes this. Also, I haven't seen consensus here for the name change. 81.154.241.195 (talk) 17:38, 23 May 2015 (UTC), previously 109.156.204.146

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but most of this has been covered in the talk page and the deletion discussion, where you will find this question has already been answered. There is no shortage of "highly authoritative sources" where you will find the word "riot" misapplied, but that's not an excuse to ignore definitive research and the current state of scholarship on these pieces. Auber's opera is perhaps the best example of this. The standard "riot" myth about this piece is that the opera provoked a riot which sparked the Belgian Revolution. This story has been thoroughly disproven, and retaining the label perpetuates misinformation for no justifiable reason.

If you want to talk about "scarcely definable", that was precisely the issue with this page to begin with. There was no workable definition for a "classical music riot". The page set out a very clear definition of a riot, but upon examination, none of the listed pieces rose to the page's own definition. I tried weeding out the pieces that couldn't remotely justify the "riot" label, but that made people unhappy. So, I nominated it for deletion, because there was simply no consensus (and frankly no interest from anyone but me) on how to fix the article.

That provoked a discussion where the consensus was to keep the page, but the underlying issues were unresolved. People wanted to err on the side of inclusion, and that meant listing pieces like Four Organs, which received a lot of booing and noisy behavior, but nothing resembling a riot. Therefore, a different name was required for the page, but as I pointed out, that creates the potential for the page to turn into a phone book. There's no end to the number of pieces that received unruly audience responses.

To recap, there never was a definition for "classical music riot" that was met by the pieces on the list, and the consensus was to include pieces that merely provoked unruly responses. Therefore, the name was changed to accommodate the consensus view.Trumpetrep (talk) 20:17, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

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'Front'?

'As part of a front in Vienna's ongoing style wars'

Please transform this hipster gabble into encyclopaedic language. What on earth does it mean, and more importantly, will it mean after such ephemeral smart-alec patois fades away, as it always does? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.240.49.94 (talk) 23:35, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Classic and Romantic Music History

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 January 2024 and 9 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Gokoya, Anysahardin, Lailamenden22 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Megankaustin86 (talk) 04:57, 30 January 2024 (UTC)