First Sign of Winter

Every Monday, our top management types (CEO, CFO, VPs of every description, etc) get together for what they call a Management Team meeting. I've never been to one of these confabs, but I gather that they're sort of a weekly State of the Union conference, a chance for everyone to be sure that everyone else is on the same page they're on, and that no one is caught by surprise by any new initiative, program, or directive that might come down the pipe. Everything from day-to-day finances to ticket sales to marketing is on the table, and at the end of it all, someone sends around the minutes of the meeting to all the musicians in the orchestra, and I believe to all of the staff as well. To be honest, I usually just skim these communiques, looking for key phrases like "Inside the Classics," "Grammy nomination," or "massive deficit." (That last one hasn't come up lately, fortunately.)

But for the last couple of weeks, the meeting summaries have taken note of a sharp uptick in audience complaints regarding... coughing. Yes, people do actually bother to call or write to us about their fellow patrons coughing in the middle of a performance, and every one of those complaints gets carefully logged and sent up the chain. (Even folks who complain verbally to an usher or a ticket sales rep about something or other have their comments officially noted and passed on.) This tends to happen most years around this time, because... well, you know why. We're all coming down with the winter's first salvo of The Crud, that's why. If half the audience is afflicted with Martian Death Flu, or whatever we're calling it this year, there are gonna be more than a few involuntary expulsions during the slow movement, and there's not much anyone can do about it.

But that doesn't stop our more sensitive concertgoers from getting up in arms about it, and I can understand that, I guess, although I have a hard time taking offense myself, unless the offender is well and truly hacking up a lung and refusing to leave the hall to deal with it. And at the moment, I'm truly sympathetic to the coughers, because I'm battling a serious chest cold myself, and truth be told, I was narrowly saved from hacking my way through this morning's first half by the fact that fellow violist Ken Freed happened to have a spare Halls to hand me. (Note to anyone planning to attend a concert with a cold: Halls are the way to go. I'm not saying they're the best cough drops in the world, just that they're the ones that come in soft, pliable, silent wrappers. All those little hard candies in crinkly cellophane? Those are from the devil.)

I've always divided concert hall coughers into two groups - sick coughers and bored coughers - and their presence signals two very different realities for those of us onstage. (You can tell the difference because, if your hall is full of sick coughers, you can just hear the phlegm behind it. Bored coughers sound like they're trying to alert you to the fact that the person you're saying mean things about is walking up behind you.) The sick coughers signal that winter has arrived, or is still here, or is dragging on into April. The bored coughers signal that something has gone wrong with the performance: either the conductor's interpretation is failing to engage, or the orchestra doesn't seem believable enough in its commitment to the music. Either way, the audience has lost (or failed to ever achieve) the rapt attention we're hoping to inspire. And that's a lot more our fault than theirs.

So what do we do about the coughing, and the concomitant complaints? Well, it seems like our management team is considering an array of options, from making a pre-concert announcement, to posting signs informing patrons that our ushers have cough drops available on request, to looking for a sponsor to reinstate the huge boxes of drops we used to keep at every door. (They vanished in a previous round of budget cuts several years back, which should tell you something about just how deep the budget knife can fall when tough times strike a nonprofit company.) But in the end, there's always going to be coughing, and I presume there will always be people who complain about it. Chalk it up as just one more risk of going out in public, I suppose...