[Helmut Lachenmann] said that ... when the work ["Air"] was finally performed in Frankfurt, Germany, the audience halted the percussive piece with shouts of “This is not music!” and derisive laughter.
Rick Schultz, "All he asks is: ‘Try to like it’", Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2008.
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Ah... the lethal judgment so beloved by lay people and experts alike: to dismiss the result of someone's creative efforts not because it lacks originality or craft, not because it involves factual errors or unsound arguments, but because it violates some a priori conditions supposedly necessary for admitting any kind of meaningful evaluation at all, whether positive or negative.
Thus, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was dismissed by a notable 19th century music biographer as "not belong[ing] to the art ... [of] music". Several decades later Edgar Varese's Hyperprism prompted a New York Times critic to write, "If Mr. Varese honestly believes this kind of thing is music, then he is ... deluded".
In the visual arts, one of James Whistler's (now celebrated) paintings was dismissed by an eminent 19th century art critic as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".
In mathematics the distinguished and influential 19th century mathematician Leopold Kronecker reportedly dismissed Georg Cantor's pioneering work in set theory by saying "I don't know if there is more philosophy or theology in this paper, but I am sure there is no mathematics in it".
And in physics, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow dismissed string theory by saying that "the theory is not physics at all but merely mathematical 'smoke and mirrors'".
These are the examples that readily came to mind when I learned about the audience's behavior at the premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's first major orchestral work Air, music for orchestra and percussion soloist (1967). And just as with the above mentioned works, the passage of time has changed the perception of Lachenmann's Air from that of an irritatingly incomprehensible succession of scratching and wheezing noises to that of a musical work that is startling, thrilling, and even unexpectedly beautiful.
