David Glowacki can be proud of himself, first because he is a leading scientist, an expert in non-equilibrium molecular reaction dynamics, secondly because he is the first person to be ejected from a classical concert for… crowd surfing!
This sounds like a headline you would read in the Onion, but it’s true! According to the Independent, Dr. Glowacki was attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah directed by Tom Morris, who launched the Bristol Proms. Before the performance, Morris invited the audience ‘to participate with enthusiasm in a festival which would destroy the stuffy conventions of traditional classical concerts’ and asked people ‘to bring beer into a standing ‘mosh pit’ in front of the stage’ even saying ‘Clap or whoop when you like, and no shushing other people.’ After this, nobody can’t blame Glowacki, he took these words a bit too seriously and started to express his sincere enthusiasm for Handel. According to witnesses, he ‘responded to the crescendo of the “Hallelujah Chorus” by lurching from side to side, raising his hands, whooping and then attempting an ambitious crowd-surfing manoeuvre’. He obviously crossed that invisible line between contained enthusiasm and overboard energy and was physically ejected from the ‘pit’.
‘He got very over-excited’, declared Morris to the Independent, ‘It was the first eviction of a classical concert audience member by another member we’ve found since the 18th century.’ Hey, he told the audience to get excited! His first declaration was very misleading, he wanted to break the stiffness of classical concerts, and he got what he was asking for.
You live and learn, crowd surfing is a no-no at a classical concert, what was Glowacki thinking? That he was at a Stooges concert? He got furious and responded to the scandal, first by denying he was drunk, ‘This may be a consequence of me being American, but I can quite easily be provocative without the need to be inebriated’, and by more or less accusing Morris to be a coward: ‘Classical music, trying to seem cool and less stuffy, reeks of some sort of fossilized art form undergoing a midlife crisis’… ‘Neither the bourgeoisie audience nor their curators (eg Tom Morris) really believe what they say. You’re free to behave as you like, and it’s comforting to think that you have that freedom, but it’s only available to you so long as you behave correctly.’
Plus he was not happy about the violence of the ejection: ‘Witness what happened to me when I started cheering with a 30-strong chorus shouting ‘praise God’ two meters from my face: I get physically assaulted, knocked down to the floor and forcibly dragged out by two classical vigilantes.’ Wow these guys were worst than security guards at a punk concert!
This is what happens when you try to loosen up and dust classical concerts, I never understood why they are so stiff and rigid. Morris tried a little, Glowacki tried harder, and now you may see a ‘no stage diving/no crowd surfing allowed’ sign at your concert hall. They have a long way to go if they want to draw new audiences to these concerts beside the usual old, rich, white crowd. So, go David!
