Evan Johnson

New Music Unlisted - 7 (Kitaptan Sonra)

Mabel Kwan, toy pianos.

Live, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY (MATA INTERVAL 7.1, curated by Ray Evanoff), 20 December 2013.

Positioning in Radiography (2007) for three toy pianos [one player]

Rachel Beetz.

Studio recording, 14 February 2014.

émoi (2010) for bass flute

The piece was commissioned by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund. Composed in 2022. Conductor - Yishai Steckler, Sopran - Tali Ketzef. Premired at the Henry Crown Symphony Hall, Jerusalem Theater, December 5, 2022. Recorded by Avi Elbaz
Dedicated to Peter Pohly

Riddle for the Symphony Orchestra, big choir and sopran

The new piece was written for two incredible musicians - Yael Barolsky and Oded Gezhals,recording - Ronald Boersen.
The premiere was on 1.05.14 

Repercussion for violin and percussion by Hana Ajiashvili

ELISION (Séverine Ballon, vc; Carl Rosman, voice)

Live, Melbourne Conservatory, 17 March 2014.

thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg: eight lyrics for cello and high voice (2011-13)

The piece was commissioned by the Meitar Ensemble and with the support the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. The premiere was at the CEME festival on December 23. 2023.
 Conductor - Yuval Zorn, Meitar Ensemble, Studio Anette, Tel Aviv, 2023

Impossible sketches for ensemble and electronics

MIVOS Quartet

Live, Darmstadt, Germany (Centralstation), 5 August 2014.



inscribed, in the center: "1520, Antorff" (2014) for string quartet

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]

Tslalei Or was written especially for two great musicians Yoni Gotlibovich and Yuval Zorn, the Premiere was on June 20, 2016 at Jerusalem Center for the Performing Arts

Tslalei Or (2016)

The piece was written especially for trio Catch - clarinet, cello, piano, for the festival Tslil Meudcan - Tel Aviv, 2018

Blue by self titled painting by Kandinsky

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.