John Butt OBE FRSE FBA (born 17 November 1960,[1] Solihull, England) is an English orchestral and choral conductor, organist, harpsichordist and scholar.
At the end of the 2013/14 academic session, Butt was also appointed Interim Director of Music of the Glasgow University Chapel Choir, after James Grossmith left that post to become chorus master of the Royal Swedish Opera.
[11] In July 2013,[12] using a harpsichord modeled on an original built by Michael Mietke,[13] Butt recorded Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier for the Linn label; it was released in November 2014.
[12][14] As a continuo player, Butt has recorded with many ensembles, including the English Chamber Orchestra and American Bach Soloists.
[17] Since 2005, Butt has conducted recordings of the Dunedin Consort and Players for the Linn label, many featuring reconstructions of a specific historical performance.
When an interviewer for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment asked John Butt about his preferences,[39] he expressed enthusiasm for the practice of tai chi, the films of Alfred Hitchcock,[3] the symphonies of Anton Bruckner (adding, "I can’t understand why so many people find Bruckner boring"), and the In Search of Lost Time novels of Marcel Proust (the central character, he said, is "a bit of a weed in many respects, but what a complex, detailed and wonderfully ironic weed!
He argued that "Classical and contemporary music surely flourish best in a multi-cultural, international, environment, one that is extraordinarily well provided within the UK (and which would be even better if more Scots were to reclaim some of their ownership of it)," decried the "insidious synecdochal reductionism of the independence cause," and concluded, "Such a simplistic attitude suggests that the risks of looking inwards and losing the dynamism of Scotland's own cultures are very real once we begin to live behind the Tartan Curtain.