James Oestreich, a critic for The New York Times, set out last month to review a concert at Lincoln Center featuring the works of Mozart and Stravinsky. But Mr. Oestreich found himself more focused on the man seated directly behind him, who was connected to an oxygen cart or similar medical device that emitted what he called a steady — and apparently disruptive — ticking sound.
“Hard to describe,” he wrote in his review, “it was really more of a faint, dull metallic clank in a relentless rhythm that seemed somehow resistant to all the many other rhythms emanating from the stage.”
Mr. Oestreich was so distracted by the sound of the device that he devoted the majority of his review to an unusual question: what is the etiquette on medical hardware during a live show? Is the disruption of a few listeners during a performance “acceptable collateral damage” for the concertgoer who requires mechanical help?
Mr. Oestreich’s review triggered a heated response from John Walsh, president of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Foundation, who in a letter to The Times criticized the article for its lack of sensitivity, saying it promoted a “negative connotation of those (myself included) who use supplemental oxygen.”
Worldwide, 210 million people suffer from C.O.P.D. Are you telling me that those who use supplemental oxygen should not be allowed to participate in the arts for their enjoyment, because of their supplemental oxygen? We refuse to sit quietly in our homes just because a few people might have issues with the slight noise a portable oxygen concentrator might make.
I know that many individuals with C.O.P.D. would love the possibility of a completely silent portable oxygen device — in fact we’d like that as much as anyone. But the reality is, that doesn’t exist currently, and in the meantime, we will continue living our lives — on supplemental oxygen or not — despite what others might think or say. We have just as much a right to enjoy concerts and public outings as anyone else, and your words have deeply offended our entire community.
In an interview, Mr. Walsh said he was upset that the review even raised the question of noise from a medical device, which unlike a cellphone or pager cannot be switched off or turned to silent mode in a theater. He said he worried the review would bring shame to people who have to deal with embarrassing stigma anytime they step out in public.
“It’s not just children looking at someone because they have a tube in their nose,” he said. “It’s the adult community that by and large thinks that just because you’re using supplemental oxygen you must have smoked, so therefore you did it to yourself. I myself have a genetic condition. I never smoked a cigarette in my life, but I have 34 percent of normal lung function and I need to use supplemental oxygen when I sleep, when I exercise or when I fly.
“To me it’s incredible that someone would not at least understand that if you’re using supplemental oxygen, you have no choice — you can’t breathe otherwise.”
In his review, Mr. Oestreich acknowledged that classical music audiences can seem pampered and intolerant, “with their ceaseless demands for silence in their surroundings.” But quiet, he wrote, is essential for classical music in its “unamplified — that is, its classic — form, where contrast is everything.” He also pointed out that he, too, requires mechanical medical assistance, from a mechanical heart valve he had implanted last year to correct a congenital heart condition.
“Today even I can hear the ticking only in a small, reverberant space or in the dead of night,” he wrote. “No one has yet tried to shush me in a concert hall. But what if.”
In his letter, Mr. Walsh said he hoped the reviewer would have a change of heart, then invited him to a C.O.P.D. Awareness Night event with the New York Mets, which takes place this Saturday night at New York’s Citi Field.
View the full review, “A Faint Sound at a Concert, but Impossible to Ignore.” Then please join the discussion below.
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