Unterschrift for solo piano (2019)
Dedicated to Pavlos Antoniadis
Besides his music, I was always attracted to  Beethoven’s manuscripts, that uneasy almost frenetic way in which he expressed his musical ideas. I went back to those manuscripts,  I was struck -above all- by his signature, the fragility in which the great Ludwig van sealed his works. Unterschrift is an investigation or perhaps a reflection on that space, on that periphery of his music. MT
Live performance at 2021 Contemporary Insights Summer Academy for Present-Day Music. Supported by the InSzene program of the German Music Council with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media

Unterschrift (2019)

Evan Johnson consistently characterises his music as ‘absolutely private’; secretive, even. As a result, the listening experience can feel almost voyeuristic, as if looking over the pianist’s shoulder, catching the piano in an otherwise imperceptible whisper.

lists, little stars

Evan Johnson: qu’en joye on vous demaine

Documentary about the work produced by Ensemble Musikfabrik (YouTube):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=_8cce8Z-Nkixqwgf&v=BFrIfk4Bl0s&feature=youtu.be

Turgut Erçetin, composer/interview
Carl Rosman, clarinet/interview
Aaron Cassidy, conductor

Hans Fahr, video/editing
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW and Ensemble Musikfabrik

image credit: Photograph by Félix Bonfils, 1875

"Thousand Dead Bodies Under My Bed, All Cloaked with the Breath of the Living"

"Marea flusso deriva", for six voices(2022)
From the Book of madrigals "Il Libro dei Margini" © Casa Ricordi.

For a video with score-following: https://youtu.be/1RHXJvHc3us

Dreams are one of the most fascinating and complex experiences of the human psyche. Every night, each of us crosses all thresholds of consciousness, plunges into the unconscious and is catapulted into incredible, frightening, joyful, exhilarating, horrific or enigmatic adventures. It is a journey with a mysterious outward ticket and a reassuring mandatory return that can, nevertheless, bring us back changed. In dreams, physical reality is transcended, verisimilitude lost, perceptions completely distorted and time suspended. Therefore, how can a musician, who modulates time and perception by trade, not be interested in dreams?

Marea Flusso Deriva (Tide Flow Drift) is the opening piece of a Book of madrigals dedicated to the different perceptions one goes through during sleep, namely: the loss of consciousness, the dreams, the vague memory, the quality of time, the voices and sounds hovering in this particular situation.
Each madrigal of The Book focuses on a particular dream or fragments of different dreams. Elements appear and are perceived in a non-linear way; they are confused, blurred, inconsistent. 
The explicit reference to madrigal suggests the intention to immerse the listener in an invisible inner theatre, full of symbolic and allusive sounds that everyone can interpret and connect in various ways, imagining a different story.
I wrote and elaborated the madrigal libretto myself from transcriptions of personal dreams, phrases from everyday life and fragments by Georgi Gospodinov. I used excerpts from the work of the poet Alessandra Conte, who also wrote an original text for this madrigal. Moreover, dramatic situations are also expressed through what I call Pre-Semantic Archetypes: vocal sounds directly recalling primordial emotions such as fear, joy, anger, satisfaction, pain, desire, etc.

"Marea flusso deriva" stages the moment when an imaginary Self, representing each of us, closes its eyes and falls asleep. Echoes of the images and voices perceived during the day overlap chaotically in its mind. Gradually, the disordered rhythm of these images and sounds gives way to the biological and cyclical rhythm of calm night breathing. The durations dilate and we enter the temporal dimension of sleep, dotted with fictitious presences, remnants, memories and mysterious epiphanies, where the enigmatic theatre of dreams comes to life.
In this space, a vague threatening presence takes the form of a bull/Minotaur chasing us into an endless underground city where we try to escape. At the same time, a sentence condemns us to death and the city in which we are escaping turns into our own bowels catching fire.
Once successfully escaped to the surface, we suddenly find ourselves on the shore of a calm sea where we are entranced by the mysterious song of a woman.

EXAUDI Vocal ensemble. Live recording of the WP at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022/11/19

Marea flusso deriva

Performed by Olivia Stahn [soprano], Mathilde Conley, Florian Baccuet, Paul Hübner, Chloë Abbott [trumpets], Samuel Stoll, Morris Kliphuis [horns], Wojciech Jeliński, Weston Olencki, Maxine Troglauer [trombones], Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir [harp] Matthias Engler [percussion], Max Murray [conductor]

Max Murray | Schaufeln | Brayen — Rain / for soprano, brass, harp, and percussion [2023 version]

Live Recording - City University (June 2015)

Ferneyhough - Lemma-Icon-Epigram

Concerti

Wet Ink (Erin Lesser, piccolo; Josh Modney, violin)

Live, St. Peter's Church, New York, NY, 10 June 2016

Recorded and mixed by Sam Pluta

L'art de toucher le clavecin, 2 (2009) for piccolo with violin [Wet Ink]

Ian Power, harmonica; Richard Craig, piccolo

two people offering things and themselves to each other

recorded at Spectrum NYC by Lester St. Louis and Lawrence de Martin

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp8t8NTmBis&feature=youtu.be

please

Ballade for Piano and Orchestra
Live Recording Musica Viva Munich
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Nicolas Hodges
Johannes Kalitzke

Ballade for Piano and Orchestra

In 1975, I discovered, in an anthology of mediaeval philosophy, two very interesting, interrelated texts. The first of these was an extract from Boethius’ commentary on Porphyry’s "Isagoge", itself a gloss on a fragment of Aristotle’s Categories, while the second, from Peter Abelard’s "Logica ingredientibus", took the exegetical process a stage further.  These two increasingly detailed commentaries on an original text seemed to me to illustrate perfectly the survival from ancient times to the Renaissance of a specific philosophical tradition.  I was fascinated by the impression they created of, on the one hand, an enviable and unassailable continuity, and, on the other, of increasing sterility and authoritarianism (not to mention futility, as the Aristotle text may not, in any case, be genuine).  Furthermore, the texts suggested to me the possibility of a musical counterpart, in the shape of simultaneous layers of commentary on a basic 'text', which I conceived as a pre-existing piece of music, most likely Renaissance vocal polyphony.  It seemed obvious that the piece should be for large string orchestra. Interestingly, the scoring I eventually chose was influenced by that of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, rather than by either of the two well-known pieces for string orchestra by earlier British composers, Vaughan William’s "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" and Tippet’s "Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli".     

I had initially wanted to base the piece on Easter Responsories by the early Baroque composer Marco da Gagliano. However, unsatisfied by the preliminary sketches I made using this material, I considered various alternatives, eventually selecting William Byrd’s motet "Emendemus in melius" (1575). I was influenced in my choice by the fact that Tudor church music was the great love of my then partner, the late Deborah Roberts, to whom the piece is dedicated . I was also attracted by the motet’s exhortatory text (“Let us change for the better”) and by its simple yet suggestive structure: it is in twelve sections, each of which moves seamlessly from homophony to polyphony.  The first four return to homophony, but from the fifth section onwards polyphony begins to predominate, until the four final sections are overwhelmingly polyphonic.  The local movement within sections and the overall tendency towards polyphony seemed to contain implications for the two levels of commentary I had decided upon.  Similarly, Byrd’s division of the twelve sections into three groups of four suggested a large-scale form of three major sections (all of which, I decided, would end with a coda, each longer and more fully scored than the one before).

Having decided on the Byrd motet, I began work on the piece towards the end of 1981, while studying with Brian Ferneyhough at the Musikhochschule, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. I finished it in January 1984. 

In 1982, I visited the ancient Roman city of Heraculaneum, near Naples and was struck by the way that the three clearly defined layers created by the Roman city, the older part of the town of Ercolano on top of a cliff high above and the modern city further back, seemed both a parallel to and a justification of my conception.

"Music for 25 Solo Strings"  was first performed  on 20th February 1986 at St. Johns, Smith Square, London by the London Chamber Symphony, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez.

A more comprehensive exploration of "Music for 25 Solo Strings" can be found in my book "Fragile Continuities" (Vision Edition, 2022).

Epitomaria-Glosaria-Commentaria: Music for 25 Solo Strings

Evan Johnson [b. 1980] is an American composer whose music focuses on extremes of density and of reticence, of difficulty and of sparsity, and on hiding itself. 

His music has been performed throughout North America, Europe and beyond by leading ensembles such as Musikfabrik, ELISION, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Trio Accanto, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Riot Ensemble, EXAUDI, and many others, as well as a wide variety of international soloists.

His work has been programmed at many international festivals of contemporary music, including the Lucerne Festival, Darmstadt Summer Courses, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Milano Musica, Ultraschall (Berlin), TRANSIT (Leuven), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Utrecht), Klangwerkstatt Berlin, London Contemporary Music Festival, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäße Musik, and others, featured on the Monday Evening Concerts series in Los Angeles, and heard at such venues as Miller Theatre (New York) and London’s Wigmore Hall. Portrait discs are available on Kairos, all that dust, and Another Timbre, with others forthcoming; recordings of individual works are available on HCR, Metier, New Focus, Label Musikfabrik, and Wergo. Selected scores are published by Edition Gravis (Berlin).

Also active as a writer on contemporary music, Johnson has contributed to Tempo, Contemporary Music Review, MusikTexte, Music Theory Spectrum, GroveMusic Online, and NewMusicBox, and provided booklet essays for discs on the Mode, NEOS, NMC, Metier, and Kairos labels with music by Peter Ablinger, Joanna Bailie, Aaron Cassidy, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Andrew Greenwald, and James Weeks.

He holds degrees in composition from SUNY Buffalo and Yale University, and has lectured widely on his own work and taught composition, analysis and orchestration at SUNY Buffalo, Northeastern University, and Harvard. He lives in Amsterdam and in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife and two small children.

L'art de toucher le clavecin, 2 (2009) for piccolo with violin [Wet Ink]

Evan Johnson

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