Musicians - Ben Johnston

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	Musicians - Ben Johnston

Benjamin Burwell Johnston, Junior (born March 15, 1926 in Macon, Georgia) is a composer writing in the just intonation system. He is best known for extending Harry Partch's experiments in just tuning to traditional instruments through his system of notation. Johnston taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois from 1951 to 1983. Johnston began as a traditional composer of art music before working with Partch. After working with Partch he studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. It was in fact Partch himself who set Johnston up with Milhaud. It should be noted that Johnston struggled with just how to integrate just intonation into his compositions for a number of years. Since 1960 Johnston has used, almost exclusively, a system of microtonal notation based on the rational intervals of just intonation. Johnston also worked with John Cage, who encouraged him to pursue the composition of just-tuned music for traditional instruments.

Johnston's early efforts in just composition drew heavily on the accomplishments of post-Webern serialism. His String Quartet No. 4 "Amazing Grace", however, ushered in a change of style in which tonality plays a central role. Johnston has come to advocate a tonal system of 65 notes to the octave, with emphasis on the crucial interval of the syntonic comma. The String Quartet No. 4 was recorded by the Kronos Quartet and is perhaps Johnston's best-known composition. His "Amazing Grace" quartet was also recorded by the Kepler Quartet on a CD for the New World Records 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 two quartets were premiered this way by the Concord Quartet at New York's Alice Tully Hall, on March 15, 1976 (the composer's fiftieth birthday).

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 (1977) and the Suite for Microtonal Piano (1964). Johnston has completed ten string quartets to date. The Kronos Quartet, led by David Harrington, has a standing offer to record all ten quartets, but its label, Nonesuch, has thus far refused the offer. In 2006, the Kepler Quartet issued String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9 for the New World Records label. As of 2006, the Kepler Quartet plan to follow up with String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, 6, 8 & 10, for New World Records. Also as of 2006, New World Records, through its Database of Recorded American Music (an online subscription service for colleges, universities and libraries), plans to make the Kepler release(s) available, along with the rest of New World Records' catalogue (including Johnston's Sonata for Microtonal Piano, Five Fragments for voice, oboe, bassoon and cello, Gambit for 12 instruments, Ponder Nothing for solo clarinet, Septet for woodwind quintet, cello and contrabass, Three Chinese Lyrics for soprano and two violins, and Trio for clarinet, violin and cello), to students, faculty and scholars affiliated with a subscribing university, without charge to the individual.

Johnston's mature style features a direct tonal warmth supplemented by the sonorities of just-tuned intervals. Johnston often adopts the 7-limit and sometimes 11-limit or beyond in his compositions, introducing players and audiences to sonorities that are tonal but nonetheless rare in conventional tonal music.

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. The wildly beating sonorities of equal temperament are thought to resemble (and perhaps foment) the fast-paced, unmeditative current of present-day Western existence. Many just intervals lack the sharp vibrancy of irrational intervals (and higher-order rational intervals) and thus are sometimes felt to convey an affect of stasis and meditative calm. Indeed, cultures whose tuning systems draw heavily on purely tuned intervals (e.g., North Indian classical music) tend to value meditative social attitudes more greatly than in the West.

Johnston has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and the Humanities in 1966 and two commissions from the Smithsonian Institute.

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