But others are trying to embrace the digitally tethered: Some orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, have experimented with letting people keep their phones on during some concerts and offer an app to guide people through the music. The Boston Symphony Orchestra does this, too, at select “Casual Fridays” concerts, in certain designated seats.

And then there are the compromises: When Bruce Springsteen was on Broadway in 2017 and last year, the production put an insert in the Playbill, urging fans accustomed to rock concerts not to use their phones during the show, but promising that Mr. Springsteen would stay onstage during the curtain call long enough for people to take pictures. The Metropolitan Opera offers similar advice on its website: “Tip: Snap a pic of the cast during curtain call!”

The issue is complicated because so many audience members have become habituated to photographing and videotaping sporting events, pop concerts, even dinner. And the truth is that live performers, who have long battled piracy and bootlegging, also rely on fan-fueled social media to bolster ticket sales.

Some observers suggest that the restrictions on audience behavior are snobbish, elitist, or even manifestations of white privilege.

Writing about the “Slave Play” texting contretemps in The San Francisco Chronicle, the critic Lily Janiak argued: “What inflames American theater about Harris’ s stance isn’t that people are using cellphones in a theater, but that he’s a young black man unapologetically claiming the right to question old norms and forge new ones in a historically white institution.”

Ms. Mutter, the German violinist who stopped mid-concerto, said she was in favor of sealing phones at concerts. In her first interview about the Cincinnati incident, Ms. Mutter said that she had grown distracted as she played the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto because a woman in the first row was holding up her phone and filming her. After Ms. Mutter shot her stern looks, she said, the woman put down her phone.

“The first movement is over, and I’m trying to concentrate and stay calm,” Ms. Mutter recalled. “Then she takes out a second phone, and a power bank. I continued the second movement, but it’s already boiling in me. I’m totally out of the flow.”