Going to a concert

Everything else a first-time concertgoer worries about has an answer that is equally short, and most of the anxiety comes from assuming the rules are stricter and older than they actually are.

The one convention that genuinely exists is about when to applaud, and it is barely a century old. The rest is either practical, such as what happens to a latecomer, or invented, such as the belief that a listener needs to know something in advance to be allowed in.

The practical answers, in one table

The practical answers below cover almost every question asked before a first concert. They describe standard practice at a professional symphony concert in a British concert hall; a chamber recital or a lunchtime concert is shorter and looser, and an opera is longer.

What actually happens, from the doors opening to the last chord

What happens at a concert follows the same sequence almost everywhere. The doors to the auditorium open about half an hour before the advertised time. The orchestra drifts on in ones and twos and practises the difficult passages out loud, which sounds like chaos and is entirely normal. A few minutes before the start the players settle, the leader walks on to applause, and the tuning happens. Then the conductor comes on, bows to the audience, turns, and starts.

A typical first half is an overture or a short piece, then a concerto with a soloist. The interval follows. The second half is usually one large work, most often a symphony, which is why the running order is described as building towards something. At the end the conductor shakes the leader's hand, which is a formal gesture of thanks to the orchestra through its principal first violin, and the players are asked to stand, sometimes section by section.

The tuning at the start, and what it is actually doing

The tuning at the start is a single note, an A, given by the principal oboe and taken up by the whole orchestra in groups. The oboe gives it because its pitch is the most stable in the orchestra, being set by a hand-made double reed rather than by a slide, a valve or a peg, and because its tone cuts through everything else in the room. The A itself is normally 440 hertz, though some orchestras tune slightly higher.

The leader, who is the principal first violin and is called the concertmaster in America, controls the whole ritual: the woodwind tune first, then the brass, then the strings, because the wind have the least room to move. A wind instrument's pitch is fixed by the length of its bore and by how warm that bore happens to be, and a player can bend it only slightly by pulling a joint or a slide. A string player, by contrast, can turn a peg or a fine tuner at any moment and goes on making those corrections all evening, which is why the strings can afford to take their A last. It is not ceremony. Instruments move with the temperature of a room that has just filled with 2,000 warm bodies, and the tuning is the last correction before the temperature stops changing.

Applause between movements, and how recent the silence is

Applause between the movements of a symphony or a concerto is the one thing an audience is now expected to withhold, and the expectation is much younger than the music. Mozart wrote to his father in 1778 about the Paris audience bursting into applause in the middle of the first movement of a new symphony, and he was pleased. Through the nineteenth century, clapping after a movement that had gone well, and demanding it again on the spot, was ordinary behaviour. Encores of single movements were common.

The silence hardened in the first decades of the twentieth century. Conductors began to argue in print that a multi-movement work was a single structure whose effect depended on the tension held across the gaps, and the spread of recordings, which play a symphony straight through without interruption, quietly trained a generation of listeners into the same habit at home. By the 1930s the convention was general.

Two things follow from knowing this. The first is that clapping in the wrong place is a breach of a recent social habit and not of anything sacred. The second is a useful practical tip: watch the conductor, whose hands stay up and whose shoulders stay tense between movements, and who drops both when a work is genuinely over.

The programme book, and following music without knowing anything

The programme book does four jobs and is worth the small charge for the first of them. It gives the running order with approximate timings, so a listener knows how long each piece lasts and where the interval falls. It lists the players by name and section. It prints the sung text of any choral or vocal work, with a translation. And it carries the programme notes, which are short essays on each piece, usually saying what to listen for and where the work came from.

Reading the note before a piece rather than during it is the whole technique. A note on Frederick Delius that mentions the cuckoo call being a Norwegian folk tune is worth ten seconds of reading and changes what is heard for the following six minutes.

Following the music without knowing anything is not merely possible, it is the normal condition. No preparation is required, no score-reading, no history. The one thing worth doing is arriving at the hall with nothing else to do afterwards, because an orchestral concert is roughly two hours of undivided attention and it repays being the only thing in the evening.

Also in this programme

• Concert venues in Cardiff: the hallsThe concert halls of south Wales
• Wales Millennium CentreWhat is inside it, and who works there
• St David's HallThe national concert hall of Wales
• Frederick DeliusThe short orchestral pieces, and the long ones