Toddler exposes issue about kids at classical music concerts.

For kids, it can be a hard-knock life on the Monterey Peninsula’s cultural scene.

In July 2014, Old Fisherman’s Grotto restaurant ignited a media conflagration over a sign discouraging children. In May 2015, writer Jessica Jackley was controversially kicked out of the TEDWomen Conference in Monterey for having her 5-month-old baby with her.

Classical music and arts organizations everywhere claim to want to attract younger, more diverse, and newer audiences, including families and novices. The Carmel Bach Fest is no different (see story, previous page). But recently my wife and I were asked to remove our toddler from a local classical music concert.

Last May, a joint performance by Ensemble Monterey Chamber Orchestra and Cantiamo! Cabrillo at the Carmel Mission promised beautiful and exultant music in a program titled “Fanfare.” I suggested to my wife that we take our 2-year-old boy, expecting he would enjoy the music – or fall asleep.

The night of the concert, we sat in the back pew. The seven or so rows ahead of us were nearly empty. The orchestra and choir occupied the altar of the mission from where they filled the basilica with the sublime sounds of Monteverdi, Purcell, Strauss and others. Our child ate it up. Great.

Then he began to investigate nearby objects, tried to “talk” to us (the music mostly obscured this), and after the crescendo of one song, said, “Ooh. Big.” A couple sitting in front of us didn’t complain, but we intervened with paper, pencil and a book. It worked for awhile, but when the remedy waned, my wife took him outside (the doors were left open) to roam the grounds until intermission.

After intermission, as the choir walked down the aisle to the altar – during a quiet lull – the choir director turned to us and audibly and visibly shushed my son.

My wife and I looked at each other like, “Did that just happen?” Then an usher came up behind us and asked, upon orders given to her, if we could take our child outside, or allow them to.

We opted for a third solution. We left.

“It’s inhuman to let people hear vibrant music and expect them to sit on their hands.”

A few days later, I asked Cantiamo! Cabrillo music director Cheryl Anderson, the one who shushed us, for her take.

“Loud and full and resonant is great, and to balance that sound we chose to interject some a cappella works [into the program] to give the ear a full menu to satisfy,” she wrote by email. “The Rihards Dubra unaccompanied work we did, Oculus non vidit, is hugely impactful on the audience because of its immense beauty, its poignant dissonances, its wide-ranging dynamics, its surprising ending of aleatory risen to a fever pitch and followed by shocking silence.

“Unfortunately it was during the fever-pitched ending and immediate silence that the child’s vocalization occurred,” she continues.

That would be the “Ooh. Big.” She says that at intermission audience members commented on my son’s “vocalization,” and that at the start of the second half she heard him beginning to be fussy, and could not pause to discuss it, so shushed him. Ironically, my wife and I perceived the shush was louder than any sound our son had made, and less consistent with the spirit of the music. And because Anderson had already ordered an usher to ask us to remove him, it seemed moot and punitive.

Cathleen Gable, concert manager for the Carmel Mission, says that Anderson has been “very gracious” to her, and she’s enjoyed a good working relationship with Cantiamo! Cabrillo. But she approached us at the parking lot to invite us to stay.

“I asked [three people] if your son had been disruptive and they told me ‘no,’” she observes. “I felt, as facility manager, I could invite you back into the mission.”

We decided to go home. Our invitation to enjoy the concert, it seemed, had been revoked.

But it touched off a sequence of questions.

Is it appropriate to bring kids to classical music concerts? What if they are still and quiet? If they make noise or fidget, how much is acceptable? When adults cough, snore, talk, let cell phones buzz, or clap out of turn, should they be asked to leave? At what point do the rules and protocol inhibit enjoyment – even attendance?

Rob Klevan has been a music educator for more than 42 years with the Monterey Jazz Festival, York School, CSU Monterey Bay and elsewhere. He’s also conducted numerous concerts and performed at Carnegie Hall.

“I feel that for the sake of a sane and civilized society, it is extremely important to keep the arts alive, particularly music,” he says. “The best way to perpetuate the arts is to expose our children to them at an early age. If [arts] organizations hope to survive, they must find a way to attract younger audiences.”

How young is appropriate?

“Only the parents know,” Klevan says.

He and his wife also happen to be the couple in front of us at the Fanfare concert, and he says they were not disturbed by my son, but reports that some of the performers called the “Ooh. Big” comment “unfortunate.” He speculates they might feel the same way if, instead, an adult had sneezed loudly.

Anderson says she was simply exercising deep respect for her field. She grew up in a musical family, and has studied and performed music since she was a child. She compares music’s “exactitude of pitch, rhythm, intonation, phrasing, dynamics, articulation, formal structure, word stresses, ensemble sensitivity and balance” to brain surgery.

“Once you have spent your life investing yourself in developing your craft,” she says, “to be then doing your music and have noises interrupt the most fragile, delicate part of it is like being stabbed.”

I can respect an austere atmosphere for contemplative music.

My wife and I brought our son, as a newborn, to a Carmel Bach Festival concert called “Fresh Voices,” comprised of hushed, avant-garde pieces by Arvo Part, John Tavener, Henryk Gorecki and David Lang. We sat in the rear, on the aisle, ready to make a dash if we needed to. During the performance, a phone belonging to a woman several seats away began chiming. For a full minute. Our baby, meanwhile, nursed, listened and slept.

We’ve been careful.

But we’ve also tried to cultivate our kids’ ears, acclimate them to environments that could otherwise intimidate, and enjoy beautiful music together.

We all abide by rules in restaurants, workplaces, civic ceremonies and our own homes. One local theater company prohibits babies from kids’ musicals.

David Gordon, tenor soloist and the Bach Festival’s dramaturge, says, “It’s inhuman to let people hear vibrant music and expect them to sit on their hands. I want classical music to find ways to make itself something friendly for kids.”

The energy of music finds a match in the souls of children. It inspires them to listen, dance, sing, react. To stifle that natural exuberant communion with music seems like the definition of repression. It’s an eerie sight to see rows and rows of concert-goers’ heads keep rigid as statues while passionate, rhythmic music courses through the air.

Rock-and-roll, hip-hop, dance and pop music have captured so many hearts because they deliver on their promise of exuberance, of release, of freedom.

Gordon concedes – Anderson does too – that it’s tricky balancing between, as he puts it, the “desire to be part of the music” by applauding or exclaiming, and minimizing distraction.

Though the Bach Festival has no official policy, Gordon says “the average kid under 5 will not be happy lasting through one of our concerts.”

That leaves open the possibility of partaking in part of a concert. My wife and I have left with our kids during the intermission of Monterey Symphony concerts.

Another source of friction seems to be in the definition of “disruption.”

In a report on his blog The Rest Is Noise, longtime New Yorker music critic Alex Ross defends audience noise: “Having been hissed at, [first-time concertgoers] may never attend again. And let’s remember that shushing is itself noise. I often hear ‘Shhhh!’ from another part of the hall without having heard whatever minor disturbance elicited it. There is something dismaying about this narrow-eyed watchfulness on the part of connoisseurs and this fearfulness on the part of neophytes.”

The venue makes a difference.

“To be doing your music and have noises interrupt the most fragile, delicate part of it is like being stabbed.”

The Monterey Symphony plays the same concert program at both the 1,500-capacity Sherwood Hall in Salinas and the 718-seat Sunset Center in Carmel. The ones at Sherwood Hall are cheaper, the audience younger and more diverse. Parents with kids will feel more comfortable there, where audience “noise” just comes across as atmosphere.

The symphony’s board chairman, Lee Rosen, says they “truly value our next generation of music-lovers” as evidenced by their discount tickets for children, students and families, and their hosting more than 6,000 children at 10 free youth concerts in the last school year. But…

“We rely on parents being sensitive to both the needs of their children as well as the needs of other audience members,” Rosen writes by email.

They’ve found that kids can endure – maybe that’s not quite the right word – about 45 minutes of classical music per sitting. But they’ve put together an FAQ guide about concert etiquette that addresses dress codes (formal wear is not necessary), clapping (wait until the end of an entire work) and coughing (try not to).

And about kids: “Are my children welcome to attend the concert? Yes!”

Anderson says she loves working with children’s’ voices, has taught them her entire life, and believes that the joy that music fills children with should be “completely indulged and channeled.”

Maybe toward open rehearsals, or kids’ concerts. But concerts like Fanfare, in her estimation, are a different matter.

“The concert, itself, for musicians, represents the apex of our preparation, devotion, discipline, technique development and careful study,” she says. “There’s a special relationship the instrumentalist has with sound.”

For classical music organizations worried about their audience aging out, they have to ask who is a concert for – the artist or the audience?

The Bach Festival offers family ticket discounts, and Carmel Music Society offers free tickets to kids in grades K-12 with a paying adult. But they have their mainstay audience to contend with: older people with disposable income, long free of the consideration of children, and maybe not ready to concede the etiquette.

Gordon tells the story of a conductor, Leopold Stokowski, born in 1882 in London, who was conducting an outdoor concert in the ’60s when an airplane flew over. He shook his fist at the plane and left the rostrum. (He later came back.)

At the Monterey Jazz Festival, the sound of airplanes soaring above the Fairgrounds has been immortalized on live recordings by Billie Holiday and Dave Brubek – who improvised it into his playing – the “disruption” just a unique hallmark of the place and the moment.

“If I were asked to adjudicate,” Klevan says, “I would go with the child. Let’s keep playing the music and enjoy real life in the room.”

Classical music has to surmount prejudices to find and keep new listeners: that it’s boring, elitist, obsolete, homogenous or requires study.

A classical music concert is not school. Kids do not have to attend. If they weren’t there, what would be lost? Maybe a long and mutually sustaining relationship between music and audience?

The next time a baby or child cries, exclaims, laughs or says, “Ooh. Big,” at a concert, it might help to hear it as the sound of the next generation being introduced to this beautiful inheritance of music.

Carmel Bach Festival family-friendly concerts and events include Virginia Best Adams Master Class singing workshops 12pm July 14, 18, 21, 25, 28 at Carmel Presbyterian Church, Carmel. Free.Community Free Concert 7pm July 21, at Oldemeyer Center, Seaside. Free. Family Concert 11am July 23, at Sunset Center, Carmel. $11. 624-1521, www.bachfestival.org