The perennial debate about what to wear and how to behave at musical events has reared its ugly head yet again, and it’s largely the BBC Proms which have reawakened the issue.

This year’s audiences at the Royal Albert Hall are clapping between movements of symphonies and concertos (there has always been the curious habit in certain quarters of applauding at the end of the first movement of concertos).

Sir Roger Norrington, for one, is all in favour of the practice, as many of the performances of Beethoven he has conducted would attest.

Apparently that was the custom of the time, so is historically authentic.

But so was snuff-taking, drinking, gambling, and fornicating (how else could you get through a Handel opera dragging itself through hour after hour?).

I can already imagine period-performance buffs rubbing their hands with glee at such prospects.

I am totally against the applause-syndrome. The whole idea of a symphony is the subtle progress between movements – think of almost any of Beethoven’s.

And I once heard Mark Elder’s deeply-thought-out interpretation of Elgar’s First Symphony with the CBSO destroyed by applause disrupting the link he had so painstakingly sculpted between the third and fourth movements.

Tchaikovsky did himself no favours by making the conclusion of his Pathetique Symphony’s third movement so rabble-rousing, when we should immediately be plunging into despair.

There’s an easy answer. If you’re a newcomer to concert-going, don’t put your hands together until the others do. With luck they will be more experienced, and know the ropes.

That’s if you haven’t been intimidated from going to the event in the first place, scared off by an apparent dress-code. It’s worse in opera, whether in a proper theatre or in a country-house, with dinner jackets everywhere. Why dinner jackets? It’s not a formal meal, for heaven’s sake. And it also sets up a sexist fashion anomaly.

Woman think long and hard about dressing themselves up for the occasion, selecting dresses, wraps, shoes and whatever else, all this before the hair-styling and make-up.

Men? We just take our penguin-suits off the hanger, and there we are, end of, no thought required. It’s a bit of a lazy cop-out as opposed to what the lovely ladies we are escorting have to go through.

And all this fancy-dress must surely be off-putting to young people who own no such regalia.

I remember a queuing throng of people being conned at Birmingham Hippodrome many decades ago by the penguin-clad husband of a lady who was going to write a couple of paragraphs on a Welsh National Opera performance for a local free-sheet.

He parted the crowds like the Red Sea, declaiming “Press, Press!”. It was the uniform that did it. And I was ashamed and embarrassed.

Platform dress for orchestral concerts is becoming increasingly problematical, again with more thought required for the women than for the men. Evening dress does give a sense of occasion, but then what do you do when the conductor makes his entrance wearing a loose open-necked shirt hanging over his trousers, or, as I have myself seen, a kaftan?

Afternoon concerts are more relaxed, with ordinary lounge suits (but still they are suits) for the men, but still problems of choice for the women.

I have to admit to my own pretentiousness in terms of concert dress, whether conducting school musicals or amateur operatic productions. During the week of the run I always wore a dinner-jacket (tuxedo if it was high summer). But on the last night, tails were donned, “to lift the occasion”, as I used to put it.

One Saturday evening, I went to Birmingham Hippodrome for the first act of Welsh National Opera’s Walkure, drove back to school in Halesowen to conduct the last night of Oliver (ever carved Food, Glorious Food with the Ride of the Valkyries going around in your head?), and then returned to the Hippodrome in time for the wondrous Wotan’s Farewell.

And as I walked down the auditorium at the end, I’m sure many people thought I was the conductor, Reginald Goodall. In my dreams.

But that was what the uniform did.

Performing in some kind of dress-code is one thing.

To impose one upon audiences – many of whom, I admit, embrace it with delight – is another thing.

We don’t need to intimidate young audiences.

We need to welcome them, jeans and all.