Why does everyone cough so much at classical concerts?

23 October 2024, 17:15 | Updated: 23 October 2024, 17:29

Coughing at classical concerts is virtually guaranteed as part of the listening experience...

We’ve all been there. A breathtaking, sublime slice of musical perfection, a moment of almost holy silence where space and time seem to stand still. A packed hall, totally gripped in suspense.

And then, without warning, the moment is shattered by an involuntary cough, piercing through the atmosphere like a cannon ball and leaving audience members and performers totally exasperated. Coughing has been a feature of live music ever since the medium began and yet still provides us with some of the strangest and most tense on-stage moments.

World famous conductor Michael-Tilson-Thomas once paused a performance to hand out throat lozenges and legendary violinist Kyung Wha Chung infamously complained about a child’s coughing in the Royal Festival Hall, leading to a backlash in the media.

Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel got so cross once that he stopped a performance in Hamburg and snapped at the audience: “Either you stop coughing, or I stop playing!”

Concert coughers are everywhere, seemingly taking up permanant residence in concert halls and venues around the world. They are an unavoidable characteristic of live music and to make it worse, we have all been amongst their ranks ourselves.

Read More: Why do classical musicians and orchestras usually perform in black?

But why do we all feel the need to cough so much at a classical concert?

Research conducted in Germany has proven that people are twice as likely to cough at concerts than they are in their daily lives, with scientists suggesting that the act is a deliberate form of protest, a vocalisation of a persons subconscious that may disagree with what they are hearing in front of them.

A normal adult coughs around 16 times per day. In the concert hall, however, the average audience member coughs around 0.025 times per minute, or 36 coughs over the course of a day - more than double the normal cough rate.

Professor Andreas Wagener from the University of Hannover examined the phenomenon in a study published in 2013 and concluded, shockingly, that concert coughing is a deliberate, sometimes passive aggressive behaviour or may be intended to “test unwritten boundaries of courtesy, to comment on the performance or simply document one’s presence”.

It also seems probable that the stark contrast between the peaceful and ordered setting of a classical concert hall and reality – which is often busy, noisy and chaotic – can cause some of us to cough as we adjust to this relatively artificial setting.

Concert halls can often be hot, dry or air-conditioned places, which is the ideal setting for the dreaded tickly cough to develop. Wagener also made some interesting findings concerning the kind of music people cough through, remarking that coughing is more likely to occur “in the modern pieces of 20th century classical music and the more quiet and slow movements.”

It is worth pointing out that this study was conducted before the Covid pandemic, where coughing was one of the key symptoms of having contracted the disease. Ask any concert goer in the early post lockdown days and they will tell you the same thing: there was a lot less noticeable coughing, which seems to back up Wagener’s research that coughing is a choice.

In any case, as frustrating as concert coughing can be, it seems that it is with us to stay, so pack your throat lozenges the next time you head to a concert...