Still from Pyaasa, 1957.

Appreciation of artwork is always situated in, and partly an expression of, a cultural context. And there are different cultural contexts, and, within these, different languages of appreciation. Certain milieus make room for visceral, spontaneous responses and others for a certain refinement—knowing, say, when to laugh or when to applaud. I get the impression that the latter is especially important in performances of Western classical music. People are silent as they listen. They don’t generally shake their heads or gasp with pleasure during the recital, but they must at least know when the piece has ended, and when—and how much—to applaud. Concerts of popular music, on the other hand, are often, as we know, propelled by the audience’s response—a response that’s at once visible and (at times deafeningly) audible. The joke that Joni Mitchell made to the audience in 1974—“No one said to Van Gogh, Paint a starry night again, man!”—was a rueful admission about the way audience intervention could shape the pop-rock-folk concert.

In the North Indian baithak, or soiree, the visceral, the unpremeditated, and the refined converged. The listener, too, was a participant. The Hindi word baithak relates literally to baithna, or “sitting,” and implied a far smaller space than an auditorium. It sometimes encompassed the middle-class drawing room, in which culture was often showcased in India. There were overlaps between the North Indian baithak and the Urdu mehfil, which was associated with performance and recitation. I use the past tense here because the smaller spaces, and the cultural lineage they sprang from, have been vanishing for decades. In the baithak or mehfil, the informed listener’s response followed the development of the performance like the live and changing thing it was. Appreciation expressed at the right moments—when a sense of beauty was created, say, by a note being deliberately elided in a raga—demonstrated generosity and knowledge, and both were important to a classical performer. The performer articulated a creative transformation of the melodic mode, the raga, and took liberties with the time signature. The informed listener needed to also have mastery over these time signatures and modes in order to be struck by the recital’s creative departures. One of the stock expressions of appreciation, still often used today, is the exclamation wah!, which is a nonsense word that has to be earned: it is the cognoscenti’s astonishing! or well done! It’s the paradoxical sound of informed wonder (paradoxical because the seemingly spontaneous utterance is the result of years of training and exposure, like great music itself).

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