In September 2010, I was in Tokyo for a choral tour. My previous performing experiences had been squarely confined to the Western world: the Anglophone bloc of Australia, America and the UK, and two or three concerts in continental Europe. Of all the small things that made the Japan tour utterly different, the most striking was the demeanour of the Japanese audiences. After each item on the programme, not a sound: no coughing, no paper-shuffling, no shifting around, and certainly no talking. Simply silence – until the invariably generous final applause.

We don’t see much of that in Sydney. To be sure, the Sydney concert culture to which I’m most accustomed – and next to which Tokyo seemed so alien – involves a noticeable amount of extrinsic audience noise. Regular performers on the scene often seem to roll their eyes by reflex when the subject of audience etiquette comes up. With each tour by a European stalwart – a Berlin Phil, or a Tallis Scholars – there’s a disgruntled second violinist (or the like) complaining that our audiences are the most ill-mannered they’ve ever encountered. Particular outrage issues, it appears, from those Sydney concertgoers rendered hypersensitive by harbouring a little of the old cultural cringe. Clapping between movements? You brute! Going for a throat lozenge? Barbarian! In short, it wouldn’t be a Sydney show without (i) a relatively relaxed and noisy crowd and (ii) a fair bit of self-righteous shushing.

But whence the self-righteousness? Who’s imposing this ideology of listening propriety, and why? To my mind, it stems from a relatively half-baked philosophy of high culture. We can only appreciate the great work, so the argument runs, if we are permitted for its duration to focus on it wholly, exclusively. The unspoken, intangible mysteries of the Viennese symphonists won’t reveal themselves, you know. “Deep” listening is required, the sounds on the surface can’t possibly suffice, and distractions from the cheap seats are causing us to hear only the music and therefore miss the art – and so forth. Against our will, we’re being denied the sublime experience. Because of the degree to which classical music generally is canonised and mysticised, it is possible to hold forth in this Kantian vein for some time and encounter minimal opposition.

But, as musicologists like Eric Clarke are at pains to explain, this prescriptive mode of listening, “silent, stationary, uninterrupted, ears glued to the musical structure and eyes closed”, is actually quite “uncharacteristic … of most people’s listening habits”, inside or outside the concert hall (see, for more, his book Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning). Certainly, it seems a peculiar kind of rarefied perfection. And, outside of the chapel, there’s not much historical justification for cocooning the artefacts of Western music within a silent, contemplative listening culture. From the aria di sorbetto to the Surprise Symphony, composers have both sought and expected engagement and responsiveness from their audiences. From a performer’s point of view, too, the ideal relationship with the audience is always one of interaction. I didn’t know where to look between pieces in those Tokyo concerts: because so little was coming back from the audiences, things felt awkward and disconnected. It’s difficult to influence an atmosphere you can’t detect.

I want neither to castigate the silence of Tokyo nor to valorise the susurrus of Sydney. No doubt the behaviour of Japanese classical music audiences has at least as much to do with a deeply entrenched culture of public respect than it does with abstract idealisations of the role of the listener. And I’ve witnessed horrifyingly inconsiderate pieces of audience behaviour in most of Sydney’s big venues. I do, however, want to advocate a middle ground: there is nothing wrong, as an audience member operating always within your culture’s normal constraints of social politeness, with enjoying and receiving classical music in any way you see fit. That’s what live audiences in other musical genres do. Nobody should feel obliged to conform to the artificial, straitjacketed behaviour that characterises the type of listening usually bandied about as “ideal” or “appropriate” to concert culture. It’s no such thing.

So, if you think you’ve been denied an experience or two, perhaps it’s time to reconsider where the blame lies.