![]() ![]() A few years later he was controlling his problems via diet. He would look at my score for fifteen minutes without speaking, and then say something incisive and profound. When I studied with him privately in 1983-86 (post-doctorate), he was on medication that made him very quiet. He thought he had some kind of mental disorder, possibly caused by being taught to meditate wrong by the Gurdjieff cult in the early ‘60s – this is what he repeatedly told me, even in interviews. The conceptual achievement leaves Boulez and Stockhausen in the dust.īen had a strange mind, and I say that up front only because he often frankly said so. Moment by moment, the music can sound as mild as Ned Rorem. The conceptual achievement leaves Boulez and Stockhausen in the dust. But it is carefully written so that if the players can get their perfect fourths and seventh harmonics in tune, they can creep securely, interval by interval, through this free, gridless, infinite pitch space – astronauts of harmony, floating beyond the gravity of A 440. It is structured around a 176-note microtonal scale that glacially traverses one octave over 177 measures, and, written in 1984, it remained on the page until the Kepler Quartet recorded it a couple of years ago. Famously, the third movement of his Seventh String Quartet contains more than 1200 pitches to the octave. I truly think that he thought there were no limits to what pitch and rhythm relationships musicians could learn to play, as long as the approach to the difficulties was gradual and intelligible. Where the hell did this fit?įorty-odd years later, several of them spent working with him, I still think there’s an essence to Ben that in the current musical climate can only be seen as a paradox: he was a down-to-earth, populist visionary. Conservative versus avant-garde was how we divided the music world up at that time. Ben lectured and played a recording of his Fourth String Quartet, based on the song “Amazing Grace.” He was a Quaker-bearded, good-humored, gruff, not very talkative fellow, and there was a peculiar contradiction, I think we all sensed, in this composer who had invented his own pitch notation and 22-pitch scale and written a score nearly black with ink using all these crazy polyrhythms of 35 against 36 and 7 against 8, 9, and 10 – all at the service of an old folk song anyone’s grandmother could sing. The composers at the big Midwest music schools were in continual rotation as each other’s guest composers, which in itself was an amazing education. I first saw Ben Johnston when I was a student at Oberlin, maybe 1976. ![]() Posted on Augby Kyle Gann - Headlines, Memorials, NewMusicBox Author: Kyle Gann From Folk Song to the Outer Limits of Harmony-Remembering Ben Johnston (1926-2019) ![]()
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