"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music

Introduction

introduction Bob Gilmore For the past fifty years Ben Johnston has been the most genuine kind of radical: a composer who has made a mark on American music in the late twentieth century not by loudly espousing a cause but by the persuasiveness of his thought and the appeal and fascination of his music. He has been described by critic Mark Swed as “probably our most subversive composer, a composer able to make both radical thinking and avant-garde techniques sound invariably gracious.”1 Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1926, Johnston studied in Virginia, Ohio, and northern California, and taught for over thirty years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He now lives and works in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.He is proof positive—if proof be needed—that much of the most inventive and refreshing music of the composers of his generation in the United States was created away from the urban centers, in the supposed backwater of university towns. His large body of compositions includes opera and musical theater, music for dance, orchestral and chamber works, choral and solo vocal works, piano music, tape pieces, and indeterminate works. And although his music is still not as widely known as it deserves to be, it has an ever-increasing number of committed advocates among performers , composers, musicologists, and the general public. Johnston’s output as a whole defies easy classification. The entry on his work in the 2001 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that “Johnston’s reputation has rested primarily on his work in microtonality”: 2 while this statement is true,it offers only a partial view of his overall compositional achievement. His work indeed took the direction that most strongly characterizes it as a result of his period of study (in 1950–51) with the American composer, instrument builder, and theorist Harry Partch. Johnston is, together with Lou Harrison and James Tenney, one of the small but significant number of American composers whose work was crucially transformed through their encounter with Partch.3 But just as Johnston’s music sounds xii introduction nothing like Partch’s,neither does it much resemble that of Harrison or Tenney ; the listener in search of some degree of stylistic consistency in these composers’ music will be disappointed. Nonetheless, because of the lineage from Partch and Johnston’s subsequent commitment to extended just intonation as a tuning practice, Johnston has often been bracketed together with other American microtonalists roughly his age, such as Ezra Sims and Easley Blackwood. But this association is also misleading: Johnston has never been a card-carrying microtonalist, and such affinity as he feels with other composers exploring extended pitch materials does not necessarily extend to an identification with their aims or overall aesthetic standpoint. In being close to but always somewhat apart from most of the main directions in American composition in the second half of the twentieth century, Johnston perhaps more closely resembles composers of his generation such as Robert Erickson, Kenneth Gaburo, Roger Reynolds, and Alvin Lucier; their careers were, like his, forged in a university milieu, but their unorthodox music has operated freely from the fashions and constraints of that milieu.Another form of kinship might be with the various nonconformists who were his colleagues at the University of Illinois, such as Herbert Brün, Lejaren Hiller, or Salvatore Martirano. Johnston belongs equally to another tradition: that of the truly literate composer, able to write and speak about his own music (and that of others ) with great eloquence and charm. Throughout his life he has acceded to requests to contribute a variety of texts—technical articles, discussion papers, position statements, studies of other composers—to a wide range of publications. Some of these were written for small-circulation journals or were published in books of conference proceedings and have until now been difficult to obtain, especially outside the United States. This volume gathers together, for the first time, all of Johnston’s significant writings, together with a body of texts of more modest scope that help illuminate other aspects of his work.As editor I have tried to be as inclusive as possible, placing informal lecture texts alongside technical articles, personal reminiscences alongside texts that ask searching questions about the role of the composer in the modern world. I have included also a sheaf of Johnston’s program notes for his own compositions, to point the reader more directly to the body of music that is Johnston’s primary achievement...