Ben Johnston
Encyclopedia
Benjamin Burwell Johnston, Jr. (born March 15, 1926 in Macon, Georgia
Macon, Georgia
Macon is a city located in central Georgia, US. Founded at the fall line of the Ocmulgee River, it is part of the Macon metropolitan area, and the county seat of Bibb County. A small portion of the city extends into Jones County. Macon is the biggest city in central Georgia...

) is a composer of contemporary music in the just intonation
Just intonation
In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

 system.

Johnston's music

Ben Johnston is best known for extending Harry Partch
Harry Partch
Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...

's experiments in just intonation
Just intonation
In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

 tuning to traditional instruments through his system of notation. Johnston's compositional style is eclectic, employing serial processes, folksong idioms (String Quartets 4, 5 and 10), repetitive processes, traditional forms like fugue and variations, and intuitive processes (Fonville 1991, 120–21), as well as twentieth-century experimental modernism and neoclassicism (though extending into jazz ("Revised Standards," for string quartet), and rock music (the rock-opera "Carmilla"); one of his compositional goals is to demonstrate the versatility of just intonation tuning in many styles. However, his main goal, "has been to reestablish just intonation as a viable part of our musical tradition" (Bermel 1995).

Most of his later works use an extremely large number of pitches, generated through just intonation procedures. In them, Johnston forms melodies based on an "otonal
Otonality and Utonality
Otonality and Utonality are terms introduced by Harry Partch to describe chords whose notes are the overtones or "undertones" of a given fixed tone. For example: 1/1, 2/1, 3/1,.....

" eight-note just-intonation scale made from the 8th through 15th partials of the harmonic series
Harmonic series (music)
Pitched musical instruments are often based on an approximate harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous frequencies simultaneously. At these resonant frequencies, waves travel in both directions along the string or air column, reinforcing and canceling...

) or its "utonal
Otonality and Utonality
Otonality and Utonality are terms introduced by Harry Partch to describe chords whose notes are the overtones or "undertones" of a given fixed tone. For example: 1/1, 2/1, 3/1,.....

" inversion. He then gains 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
Limit (music)
In music theory, limit or harmonic limit is a way of characterizing the harmony found in a piece or genre of music, or the harmonies that can be made using a particular scale. The term was introduced by Harry Partch, who used it to give an upper bound on the complexity of harmony; hence the name...

. His String Quartet No. 9 uses intervals of the harmonic series as high as the 31st partial. Thus Johnston uses, "potentially hundreds of pitches per octave," in way that is, "radical without being avant-garde," and not for the creation of, "as-yet-unheard dissonances," but in order to, "return...to a kind of musical beauty," he perceives as diminished in Western music since the adoption of equal-temperament (Gann 1995, p.1). "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" (Gilmore 2006, xviii).

Johnston's early efforts in just composition drew heavily on the accomplishments of post-Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...

 serialism
Serialism
In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

. His String Quartet No. 4 "Amazing Grace", however, ushered in a change of style in which tonality
Tonality
Tonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center", or tonic. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840...

 plays a central role. It was commissioned by the Fine Arts Music Foundation of Chicago, and was first recorded by The Fine Arts String Quartet on Nonesuch in 1980 (and reissued on Gasparo as GS205). The String Quartet No. 4, perhaps Johnston's best-known composition has also been recorded by the Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...

, and the Kepler Quartet recorded it on a CD for the New World Records
New World Records
New World Records is a record label based in New York City specialising in American music. The label was established in 1975 through a Rockefeller Foundation grant to produce a 100 disc anthology covering 200 years of American music....

 label, the first of a proposed series to document Johnston's entire cycle of string quartets. It is on this CD that String Quartet No. 3 was recorded (for the first time) to create a pairing, with String Quartet No. 4, called Crossings. The Third Quartet was premièred this way by the Concord String Quartet
Concord String Quartet
The Concord String Quartet was an American string quartet established in 1971. The members of the quartet were Mark Sokol and Andrew Jennings, violins; John Kochánowski, viola; Norman Fischer, cello. They gave their last regular concert on May 15, 1987...

 at New York's Alice Tully Hall, on March 15, 1976 (the composer's fiftieth birthday) (Rockwell 1976).

Biography

Johnston taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

 from 1951 to 1986 before retiring to North Carolina (Gann 1995, p.1). While there he was in contact with such "avant-garde" figures as John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...

, and Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...

 (Gann 1995, 1). Johnston's students include Stuart Saunders Smith
Stuart Saunders Smith
Stuart Saunders Smith is a notable and widely performed American composer, percussionist, and poet. He was born in Portland, Maine and grew up in Portland and central Maine, to a family that had originally come from central Maine.He studied with Edward Diemente at the Hartt School of Music...

, Neely Bruce
Neely Bruce
Neely Bruce , Professor of Music and American Studies at Wesleyan University, is a composer, conductor, pianist and scholar of American music....

, Thomas Albert
Thomas Albert
Thomas Albert is an American composer and educator.♥-Biography:Thomas Albert attended the public schools of Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Wilson, North Carolina. In 1970, he received the degree A.B. from Atlantic Christian College , where he studied composition with William Duckworth...

, Michael Pisaro
Michael Pisaro
Michael Pisaro is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations, including several pieces for variable instrumentation...

, Manfred Stahnke
Manfred Stahnke
Manfred Stahnke is a German composer and musicologist from Kiel. He writes chamber music, orchestral music and stage music. His music is notably known for his use of microtonality.- Life:...

, and Kyle Gann
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...

. He also considers his practice of just intonation to have influenced Mannfred Stahnke, and with James Tenney
James Tenney
James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...

, Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky is a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and a professor at Dartmouth College. He is a founding member and co-director of . He co-wrote HMSL with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom....

 (Bremel 1995).

Johnston began as a traditional composer of art music
Art music
Art music is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition...

 before working with Harry Partch
Harry Partch
Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...

, helping the senior musician to build instruments and use them in the performance and recording of new compositions. After working with Partch, Johnston studied with Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...

 at Mills College
Mills College
Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...

. It was in fact Partch himself who arranged for Johnston to study with Milhaud (Duckworth 1995, 122). Johnston, beginning in 1959, was also a student of John Cage, who encouraged him follow his desires and use traditional instruments rather than electronics or newly built ones (Bermel 1995). Unskilled in carpentry and finding electronics then unreliable, Johnston struggled with how to integrate microtonality and conventional instrumentals for ten years and struggled with how to integrate microtones into his compositional language through a slow process of many stages (Gann 1995, p.1). However, since 1960 Johnston has used, almost exclusively, a system of microtonal notation based on the rational intervals of just intonation
Just intonation
In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

, what Gann (1995, 1) describes as a "lifelong allegiance" to "microtonality".

Other works include the orchestral work Quintet for Groups (commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Sonnets of Desolation (commissioned by the Swingle Singers), the opera Carmilla, the Sonata for Microtonal Piano
Sonata for Microtonal Piano
Sonata for Microtonal Piano is a sonata for specifically microtonally tuned piano by Ben Johnston written in 1964 .The composer is trying to escape the "standard" forms of music; in the words of the composer:-Grindlemusic:...

(1964) and the Suite for Microtonal Piano
Suite for Microtonal Piano
Suite for Microtonal Piano is a suite for specifically microtonally tuned piano by Ben Johnston written in 1977 ....

(1977). Johnston has completed ten string quartets to date. The Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...

, led by David Harrington, has a standing offer to record all ten quartets, but its label, Nonesuch
Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...

, has thus far refused the offer (Bemel 1995).

Following on the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Johnston believes that music has the power to influence and even control social trends. Johnston believes that an equal tempered tuning system based on irrational intervals contributes to the hectic hyper-activity of modern life. "Tempered tuning is not the acoustically simplest kind. In just tuning, any interval is tuned so as to eliminate 'beating' (the result of vibrations interfering with each other). Just intonation is the easiest to achieve by ear. In this kind of tuning, all intervals have vibration rates related by small whole-number ratios. The larger the integers of the ratio, the greater the dissonance" (Johnston 2006, 42).

Johnston has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 in 1959, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and the Humanities in 1966, two commissions from the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

 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 (Lamparter 2008).

An interview with Ben Johnston can be found in Duckworth 1995. Heidi von Gunden has published a monograph on the composer (von Gunden 1986), and Bob Gilmore
Bob Gilmore
Bob Gilmore is a musicologist, educator and keyboard player, born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland in 1961. He studied at York University, England, Queen's University, Belfast , and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the University of California, San Diego...

 has edited the composer's complete writings (Johnston 2006).

Recordings

  • 2011. Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 1, 5 & 10. Kepler Quartet. New World Records CD 80693.
    • Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 5
    • Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 10
    • Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 1, 'Nine Variations'
  • 2006. Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9. Kepler Quartet. New World Records CD 80637.
    • Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 9
    • Ben Johnston: Crossings: String Quartet No. 3
    • Ben Johnston: Crossings: The Silence
    • Ben Johnston: Crossings: String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace")
    • Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 2
  • 2005. Susan Fancher: Ponder Nothing. Innova Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Ponder Nothing
  • 2002. Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Vol. 1, 2 & 3. Troppe Note Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Songs of Loss
  • 1997. Phillip Bush
    Phillip Bush
    Phillip Bush is an American classical pianist, with a career focusing primarily on chamber music and contemporary classical music....

    : Microtonal Piano
    . Koch International Classics.
    • Ben Johnston: Suite for Microtonal Piano
    • Ben Johnston: Sonata For Microtonal Piano
    • Ben Johnston: Saint Joan
  • 1996. Michael Cameron: Progression. Ziva Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Progression
  • 1993. Ponder Nothing: Chamber Music of Ben Johnston. CD recording. New World Records 80432-2. New York: New World Records
    • Ben Johnston: Septet, for woodwinds, horn, and strings
    • Ben Johnston: Three Chinese Lyrics
    • Ben Johnston: Gambit
    • Ben Johnston: Five Fragments
    • Ben Johnston: Trio
    • Ben Johnston: Ponder Nothing
  • 1995. The Stanford Quartet. Laurel Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 9
  • 1976. Sound Forms for Piano. LP recording. New World Records NW 203. New York: New World Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Sonata For Microtonal Piano
  • 1995. The Kronos Quartet
    Kronos Quartet
    Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...

    : Released (Compilation).
    Nonesuch Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace")
  • 1993. Urban Diva. Dora Ohrenstein (soprano), Mary Rowell (violin), Phillip Bush (keyboards), Bill Ruyle and Jason Cirker (pecussion), John Thompson (electric bass). Emergency Music. CD Recording. Composers Recordings Incorporated CD 654. New YorK: CRI Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Calamity Jane to Her Daughter
  • 1987. White Man Sleeps. The Kronos Quartet
    Kronos Quartet
    Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...

    . CD recording. Elektra Nonesuch 79163-2. New York: Nonesuch Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace")
  • 1984. New Swingle Singers and New Vocal Workshop. Composers Recordings, Inc.
    • Ben Johnston: Sonnets of Desolation
    • Ben Johnston: Visions and Spels
  • 1983. The New World Quartet. Composers Recordings, Inc.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 6
  • 1980. The Fine Arts Quartet:. Nonesuch Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace")
  • 1979. Music from the University of Illinois. Composers Recordings, Inc.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Duo for flute and contrabass
  • 1971. New Music Choral Ensemble, Kenneth Gaburo, conductor. Ars Nova/Ars Antiqua Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Ci-Git Satie
  • 1970. Carmilla: A Vampire Tale. Vanguard Records.
    • Ben Johnston: Carmilla: A Vampire Tale
  • 1969. John Cage & Lejaren Hiller - HPSCHD/ Ben Johnston - String Quartet No. 2. LP recording. Nonesuch H-71224. New York: Nonesuch Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 2
  • 1969. The Contemporary Contrabass. Bertram Turetzky, contrabass. Nonesuch Records.
    • Includes Ben Johnston: Casta Bertram

Books

  • Johnston, Ben. 2006. "Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music, edited by Bob Gilmore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252030982

External links


Listening

Casta Bertram, perf. Bertram Turetzky (Nonesuch, 1969): FLAC and liner notes MP3

String quartet no. 2, perf. Composers Quartet (Nonesuch, 1969): FLAC and liner notes MP3

String quartet no. 6, perf. New World Quartet (CRI, 1983): liner notes MP3 (click on "Johnston 01.mp3")

Sonnets of Desolation, perf. New Swingle Singers and New Vocal Workshop (CRI, 1984): liner notes MP3 (click on "Johnston 02.mp3")

Visions and Spels, perf. New Swingle Singers and New Vocal Workshop (CRI, 1984): liner notes MP3 (click on "Johnston 03.mp3" for part 1; click on "Johnston 04.mp3" for part 2)
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