Bonus Alex Ross material: here’s a piece he wrote for The New Yorker in 2001 about people being obnoxious during concerts:
At the invitation of Lincoln Center, Sellars staged Bach’s Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug” (“I have enough”), as the death scene of a woman in a sick ward. The mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performed in a thin hospital gown, a light bulb shining in her face. As the concert got under way, a listener on the right-hand aisle started muttering to himself, apparently because he found the production offensive. Another listener asked him several times to be quiet, but the mutterer was undeterred. “This is ridiculous,” he was heard to say. “No way to treat Bach.” Then, just before the end of the piece, the mutterer belched, and his neighbor let loose with a bloodcurdling cry of “SHUT UP, ALREADY!” The heft and color of the voice recalled Jackie Gleason in his prime. Unfazed, Lieberson launched into the cantata’s final aria, whose first words were, conveniently, “Mein Gott!”
It’s pretty hilarious.