Dutch concert

plural Dutch concerts

1. humorousobsoleteslangentertainmentA performance in which all the musicians play different songs at the same time.

   Then we had, by special desire, a Dutch concert, in which all the children sang together what song each liked best, while Miss Mathers played the overture to Tancredi on the piano as an accompaniment. The effect was in the highest degree stunning, especially when Bijou joined in with a dismal howl.

   1860, Coyne, J. Stirling, Young Frank's Holidays, or, Doings Out of School

   3 more examples

   Woe to light sleepers, whose delicate susceptibilities no rough campaigning usages had blunted as yet, for throughout the dreary night there was an everlasting Dutch concert of snortings, neighings, winnowings, squealings, from time to time diversified by the more practice misdemeanours of some intemperate little stallion or graceless mule[…]

   1859, Our Veterans of 1854: In Camp, and Before the Enemy

   The orchestras are worse than any one could believe; both musicians, and a right feeling for music, are wanting. The two or three violin performers play just as they choose, and join in when they please; the wind instruments are tuned either too high or too low; and they execute flourishes like those we are accustomed to hear in farm-yards, but hardly so good; in short the whole forms a Dutch concert, and this applies even to compositions with which they are familiar.

   186?, Lady Wallace, transl., Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from Italy and Switzerland

   The adjective "Dutch," by what seems a somewhat curious caprice of popular taste, is used in a variety of common phrases, to denote something inferior, or to some extent contemptible. A "Dutch concert" is one wherein each man sings his own song, or each performer plays his own tune, at the same time that his comrades sing or play theirs.

   1888, Charles Dickens, All The Year Round

   Synonyms: Dutch medley