John Zorn - Awards and Critical Reception

Awards and Critical Reception

In 2001 John Zorn received the Jewish Cultural Award in Performing Arts from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In 2006 Zorn was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2007, he was the recipient of Columbia University's School of the Arts William Schuman Award, an honor given "to recognize the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance." In 2011 Zorn was awarded the Magister Artium Gandensis, an honorary degree from the University of Ghent.

Zorn has attracted mixed receptions by critics throughout his career stating that "The press has never done anything but ignore and ridicule and marginalize my music—downtown music, because they don't know what to call it." A 1999 NY Times article by Adam Shatz accused Zorn of "attempt to recast Jewishness as a defiantly marginalized identity - to claim victim status - has an air of calculation about it that overpowers his music." Several letters to the Editor from critics and musicians appeared in the following weeks in support of Zorn's artistic merit. In the opinion of Howard Mandel, who has interviewed Zorn numerous times, Zorn has often expressed a reluctance to grant interviews and has requested that journalists not review his performances.

The character of Stephen Colbert from the TV show The Colbert Report mocked the MacArthur Foundation's award of the Genius Grant to Zorn on the September 20, 2006 episode in his segment titled "Who's Not Honoring Me Now". Colbert used a 10-second dissonant excerpt from the 50th Birthday Celebration Series and compared it to his blowing into a saxophone, pleading, "Genius Grant please!" Zorn's comments on the Colbert segment were "It was hilarious!"