Ben Johnston (composer)

Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (March 15, 1926 – July 21, 2019) was an American contemporary music composer, known for his use of just intonation. He was called "one of the foremost composers of microtonal music" by Philip Bush and "one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer" by John Rockwell.

Biography

Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia, and taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1951 to 1986, before retiring to North Carolina. During his time teaching, he was in contact with avant-garde figures such as John Cage, La Monte Young, and Iannis Xenakis. Johnston's students included Stuart Saunders Smith, Neely Bruce, Thomas Albert, Michael Pisaro, Manfred Stahnke, and Kyle Gann. He also considered his practice of just intonation to have influenced other composers, including Larry Polansky. In 1946 he married dance band singer Dorothy Haines, but they soon divorced. In 1950 he married artist Betty Hall, who died in 2007.

Johnston began as a traditional composer of art music before working with Harry Partch. He helped the senior musician to build instruments and use them in the performance and recording of new compositions. Partch then arranged for Johnston to study with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. In 1952, Johnston met Cage, who invited him to come to New York to study with him in the summer. Though Johnston decided he did not have sufficient time to prepare for such studies, he did go to New York for several weeks and assisted, along with Earle Brown, in the production of Cage's eight-track tape composition, ''Williams Mix''.

Later, in 1957 and 1959, he studied with Cage, who encouraged him to follow his desires and use traditional instruments rather than electronics or newly built instruments. Unskilled in carpentry and finding electronics unreliable, Johnston struggled with how to integrate microtonality and conventional instruments for ten years. He also struggled with how to integrate microtones into his compositional language through a slow process of many stages. However, since 1960 Johnston had almost exclusively used a system of microtonal notation based on the rational intervals of just intonation, what Gann describes as a "lifelong allegiance" to microtonality. Johnston also studied with Burrill Phillips and Robert Palmer.

Johnston composed music for multiple productions by the E.T.C. Company of La MaMa, Wilford Leach and John Braswell's company-in-residence at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan. His most significant work was ''Carmilla'', which the company performed as part of their repertory throughout the 1970s. He also composed music for the company's production of ''Gertrude'', a musical about the life of Gertrude Stein.

His other works included the orchestral work ''Quintet for Groups'' (commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra), ''Sonnets of Desolation'' (commissioned by the Swingle Singers), the '' Sonata for Microtonal Piano'' (1964), and the '' Suite for Microtonal Piano'' (1977). Johnston completed ten string quartets. The Kepler Quartet recorded all ten of his string quartets for New World Records in 1959, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and the Humanities in 1966, two commissions from the Smithsonian Institution, and the Deems Taylor Award. In 2007, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored Johnston for his lifetime of work. His ''Quintet for Groups'' won the SWR Sinfonieorchester prize at the 2008 Donaueschinger Musiktage.

Heidi Von Gunden wrote a monograph on the composer, and Bob Gilmore edited the composer's complete writings, which were published as ''"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music'' by the University of Illinois Press. A three-part oral history covering all stages of his career is housed at the Oral History of American Music through Yale University.

Johnston died from complications of Parkinson's disease in Deerfield, Wisconsin, on July 21, 2019.

Music

He is best known for extending Harry Partch's experiments in just intonation tuning to traditional instruments through his system of notation.

Johnston's compositional style was eclectic. He used serial processes, folk song idioms (string quartets 4, 5, and 10), repetitive processes, traditional forms like fugue and variations, and intuitive processes. His main goal was "to reestablish just intonation as a viable part of our musical tradition." According to Mark Swed, "ultimately, what Johnston has done, more than any other composer with roots in the great American musical experiments of the '50s and '60s, is to translate those radical approaches to the nature of music into a music that is immediately apprehensible"., quoted in .

Most of Johnston's later works use a large number of pitches, generated through just-intonation procedures. In these works he formed melodies based on an " otonal" eight-note just-intonation scale made from the 8th through 15th partials of the harmonic series, or its "utonal" inversion. He then gained new pitches by using common-tone transpositions or inversions. Many of his works also feature an expansive use of just intonation, using high prime limits. His String Quartet No. 9 uses intervals of the harmonic series as high as the 31st partial. He used "potentially hundreds of pitches per octave," in a way that was "radical without being avant-garde"; in contrast with much twentieth-century music, he used microtones not for the creation of dissonance but in order to "return €¦to a kind of musical beauty," which he perceived as diminished in Western music since the adoption of equal-temperament. "By the beginning of the 1980s he could say of his elaborately microtonal ''String Quartet no. 5''... 'I have no idea as to how many different pitches it used per octave'".

Johnston's early efforts in just composition drew heavily on the accomplishments of post-Webern serialism. His 7-limit String Quartet no. 4 "Amazing Grace", was commissioned by the Fine Arts Music Foundation of Chicago, and was first recorded by the Fine Arts Quartet on Nonesuch Records in 1980 (then reissued on Gasparo as GS205). His String Quartet no. 4, perhaps Johnston's best-known composition, has also been recorded by the Kronos Quartet. The Kepler Quartet (Sharan Leventhal, Eric Segnitz, Brek Renzelman, and Karl Lavine) also recorded the piece for New World Records