Know your audience
Good riddance. Maybe he’ll take his rather tiresome music to Antarctica next.
He can be closer to Muslim assassins. Wise choice
Absolute loser
If that’s what passes as a top classical composer these days, no wonder the genre is doomed.
What a jerk.
As a critic you cannot possibly ignore how unbearable his compositions are (I carefully avoid the word music).
Let's ignore what a potential classical music funder would conclude from a typical Slipped Disc narrative. Yes, the defense of free - if not particularly intelligent - speech can be invoked to justify those comments. Just as Elon Musk used the same argument to justify sexual abuse on Grok AI. But there is a more relevant point. Which is that this bile is just one example of how the classical music industry does not understand its market.
Norman Lebrecht and Slipped Disc are endorsed by almost the entire classical industry. Apple Music give Slipped Disc exclusive access to their download chart, industry giant Universal Music leapt into bed with Norman with their misguided Sinfini Music, and the BBC host the Lebrecht Interview. So job well done Norman and long live free speech. But are Slipped Disc readers the target market that ailing classical music wants to reach, even if questionable readership metrics are ignored? Is this readership any way representative of the target market that classical music needs to reach to grow and survive? Or is the readership just a clique of industry insiders and outside nutjobs? We will all have views on that. But there is hard evidence that the target audience lies elsewhere, and that classical music must urgently adapt to changing audience expectations to reach that target market.
As I write the video of Jean Michel Jarre's recent Seville concert is available on the French/German culture channel arte.tv. This video and the photo from the concert below show that Jean Michel Jarre attracts a very large audience - he has sold 85 million records to date. It also shows that the audience is not impoverished teenagers: they are from the affluent Gen Z cohort who want music to be a shared experience, and, whether we like it or not, cell phones are an integral part of that shared experience. It is also a fairly safe bet that there were very few Slipped Disc readers in that Seville audience.
For more than six decades I have been enjoying classical concerts and buying classical recordings. I am just one year younger than Norman, and, like him, I have had the privilege of being in close contact with some of the classical giants. I abhor drinks and ice creams being consumed in the Snape Maltings concert hall, and if cell phones ever become a concert fixture I will take refuge in my 3200 CDs. But I am also disturbed by the nascent 'Make Classical Great Again' movement which uses Slipped Disc as a platform for ridiculing any attempt to adapt classical music to changing audience expectations.
UK Government statistics suggest based on averages that I have 12 years to live, and the life expectancy of the typical classical audience at recent concerts I have attended is not much more than that. Classical music, like all artforms, is conditioned. This means it is heavily influenced by external conditions. Those conditions are now radically different from what they were thirty years ago, let alone one hundred years ago. Technology is changing at a bewildering pace, social norms are shifting, and the classical audience is suffering from demographic attrition. In an interview with me fifteen years ago the very wise and much-missed Jonathan Harvey explained that:
So there’s a big divide between amplified music and non-amplified music, and the two cultures. I think what the future must bring is things which are considered blasphemous, like amplifying classical music, in an atmosphere where people can come and go, where they can even talk perhaps, and it wouldn’t be sacrilege, and they can certainly leave in the middle of a movement if they feel like it; these are the sort of situations where young people’s music takes place, and it’s of course not expecting as much of music as those of us who are musicians would want.
But it is a kind of compromise that I think will have to happen, and if it happens, I think young people will really realize what they’re missing. They’ll realize that they’ve been stupid to be so sort of afraid of the concert hall and its demands. So that’s one vision of the future; I think nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by rather silly conventions, which we all tend to think are sacred.
Ironically one of the few perceptive comments on Norman's John Luther Adams post came from 'Make Classical Great Again' regular and serial reactionary John Borslap. He explained to the braying Slipped Disc mob that:
John Luther Adams is a great talent, composer of a kind of super ambient music, inspired by raw natural phenomena. His ‘Become Ocean’ is a masterpiece. It is not about a narrative, or structure, or phrasing as in music, but about patterns as in sonic art but with musical intervals and scales. Like ambient music, it is meant to envelop the listener, and make him forgetting normal time.
As John Borslap explains, John Luther Adams' Become Ocean won a Pulitzer Prize because it eschewed narrative, structure and phrasing to create patterns in sonic art that engage with a wider audience. That elusive new audience doesn't want classical music made great again by locking it into a straightjacket of reactionary conformity, it does not need 'classical for dummies' as advocated today by BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM, and it does not need the inoffensive and bland politically correct sonic wallpaper currently masquerading as new music. The elusive new audience wants engaging sonic art, which is what John Luther Adams' Become Ocean and Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene deliver .
Aaron Copland told us 'When the audience changes, the music changes'. John Luther Adams' music is part of that change, but there is nowhere like enough change happening in classical music, As Jonathan Harvey explained, compromises are urgently needed to reinvigorate the classical artform. Diehards in the Slipped Disc claque and others may be uncomfortable with those compromises. But the time for classical music to start looking forward to the future, instead of locking itself into the past is long overdue.
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