Allan Kozinn

Michael Mitchell, his son-in-law and personal assistant, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Johnston was an unusual avant-gardist: His music was so melodically engaging, rhythmically vital and structurally transparent that listeners who were unaware of his tuning experiments and their complex theoretical underpinnings heard his works as essentially neo-Romantic.

In addition to using microtonality — a system in which the octave is often divided into dozens of pitches rather than the traditional 12 — Johnston sometimes used serial techniques, in which pitches were presented in a predetermined sequence. He invented his own notation systems to account for his tunings, which could change from piece to piece.

His 10 string quartets, for example, are dramatic, sometimes incendiary scores with hard-driving and often tense fast movements as well as ruminative slow movements — with occasional quotations from folk melodies. His String Quartet No.4 (1973) is a set of variations on “Amazing Grace,” recast in his tuning system, which gives the melody an antique, rustic sound.

Johnston created several stage works, including “Gambit” (1959), a ballet with a vivid, jazz-tinged chamber score that Merce Cunningham choreographed, and incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (1961).

His “Carmilla” (1970), an hourlong chamber opera about a female vampire with a libretto by Wilford Leach, proved a popular draw when it was staged at La MaMa, the experimental theater in Lower Manhattan, shortly after it was completed. So did his final stage piece, “Calamity Jane to Her Daughter” (1989). Based on the possibly fictional letters of its title character, the work is built around themes in a folkish cowboy style.

Unlike Harry Partch, with whom he studied briefly and whose microtonal tuning philosophy he expanded upon, Johnston did not build specialized instruments for his music. He preferred either to retune conventional instruments or to have players find his pitches between those they were used to playing.

His passion for microtonal music grew out of a desire for intervals that were purer — more fully in tune — than those yielded by equal temperament, a system adopted by composers in the 17th century that made it possible to produce a more or less in-tune sound in any key. In the system it replaced, known as just temperament, individual notes were tuned slightly differently in each key.

“Ben’s incredible mathematical imagination vastly expanded the range of usable harmony, diffracting music into new colors we didn’t know were there,” composer and critic Kyle Gann, a former student of Johnston’s, said in an email. “His Seventh String Quartet, probably the most difficult ever written, uses more than 1,200 pitches to an octave, and seems to float like an astronaut through free pitch space. Yet he never got too sophisticated to quote tunes like ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Danny Boy,’ and that common touch keeps his music grounded in the real world.”

Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. was born in Macon, Georgia, on March 15, 1926, the eldest of two children (his sister, Janet, died in 1999). His mother, Janet Ross Johnston, was a Sunday school teacher; his father was the managing editor of The Macon Telegraph and, after the family moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 1937, The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Young Ben briefly followed in his father’s footsteps in 1942, when he became editor-in-chief of The Jeffersonian, his high school newspaper.

Johnston had been drawn to music as a child in Macon, where he heard jazz recordings by Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford and began collecting records of popular music. In Richmond, he began studying both the piano and the trombone, which he played in the school orchestra. In 1943, he won first prize in a composing competition sponsored by Scholastic magazine for a song, “Homeward,” and second prize for a keyboard fugue.

Before the end of his first term at the College of William &amp; Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he enrolled in 1943, Johnston presided over a concert of his songs, piano works and chamber pieces presented by the Student Music Club. He joined the Navy in 1944 and was posted to the cruiser Augusta. After he was discharged in 1946, he married Dorothy Haines, a singer; they divorced six months later, and Johnston returned to William &amp; Mary, where he completed his BA in fine arts in 1949.

During a visit to Richmond in 1948, Johnston met Betty Hall, an art student at Richmond Professional Institute, on a blind date; he later said that they had talked nonstop for 48 hours. They were married in 1950.

Betty Johnston died in 2007. Johnston, who died in an assisted living home, is survived by their daughter, Sybil Johnston; their two sons, Ross and Christopher; and three grandchildren.

Johnston began working on his master’s degree at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, but he was disappointed in his composition classes. He decided instead to write to Harry Partch — whose book “Genesis of a Music” he found inspiring — to ask if he could study with him. Partch, though disinclined to teach formally, engaged Johnston as an apprentice on his farm in Gualala, in Northern California.

Johnston’s duties there included tuning Partch’s homemade instruments and performing on recordings of several of Partch’s works. He and Partch also collaborated on a theater piece, “The Wooden Bird.”

In 1951, Johnston enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, to study with Darius Milhaud. By the time he completed his master’s at Mills the next year, he had accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He remained on the composition faculty there until 1983, when he became an emeritus professor. The university published a collection of his writings, “Maximum Clarity: And Other Writings on Music,” edited by Bob Gilmore, in 2006.

After meeting John Cage at a new-music festival in 1952, Johnston traveled to New York to study with him. He would work with Cage again during a sabbatical from the University of Illinois in 1959 and 1960, when Johnston won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Among his works from this period were “Gertrude, or Would She Be Pleased to Receive It?” (1957), a chamber opera about Gertrude Stein in which satire mingles with elements of both popular and modernist music; “Sonata for Microtonal Piano” (1959-64); and “Music for Groups” (1967), which was given its premiere by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra even though the players had rebelled in rehearsals against Johnston’s intonational demands and graphic notation.

Throughout his career Johnston gave thought to how music can convey the concerns of the society in which it was created.

“The fault with most serious composers today, when they undertake to present listeners with an honest view of the tension and complexity of contemporary life,” he wrote in an essay in 1963, “is that much too often they leave it at that.

“Music which evades the issues of complexity and tension or which simply reflects these aspects of life is not accepting its psychological responsibility,” he continued. “The truly significant task for contemporary music is to make this complexity intelligible.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/music/ben-johnston-dead.html" id="886908e8-ff58-3b89-ac41-e7c26002b094">The New York Times</a>.

Ben Johnston, a prolific and influential composer who used microtonal tuning systems to create a large and varied catalog of chamber works, stage pieces and music for orchestra, choir, voice and solo piano, died Sunday in Deerfield, Wisconsin, near Madison. He was 93.

Ben Johnston, Who Made Microtonal Music Melodic, Dies at 93

“But the experience,” he added, “did not turn me into an opera freak. I only know a few operas — perhaps four or five.”

He was being either modest or mischievous: Ruders has by now composed five operas of his own. As he spoke, seated alongside Becky and David Starobin — the librettists of his most recent opera, “The Thirteenth Child” — in a Boston hotel room in May, Ruders, 70, was awaiting the opening of Boston Lyric Opera’s starkly powerful new production of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2005), his third and most acclaimed work for the stage.

And he was soon to fly to New Mexico, where Santa Fe Opera will give the world premiere of “The Thirteenth Child” on July 27. (It runs through Aug. 21.)

“The Thirteenth Child” is an unusual entry in Ruders’ acidic, politically charged operatic portfolio. Based on a lesser-known Grimm fairy tale, it presents a battle between good and evil, with good triumphing, although not without cost — a first for Ruders, whose earlier operas are uniformly more pessimistic.

Oddly for opera, which revolves around commissions, Ruders undertook the work with no idea what company might stage it. And it was recorded before any house had even had a look at the score.

These departures have to do with the Starobins, first-time librettists who are better known for running Bridge Records, a respected label that focuses on new music. (David Starobin is also a renowned guitarist, with specialties in contemporary and early-19th-century repertoire.) The couple met Ruders at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in 1986 and became fast friends with the composer after being impressed by a performance of his “Manhattan Abstraction.”

“Here was this Danish guy,” David Starobin recalled, “who’s figured out how to describe New York City in music. There’s atonal stuff, there’s tonal stuff, and they’re butting up against each other — there’s a tension between the two.”

Starobin commissioned a few guitar works from Ruders and started a series devoted to the composer on Bridge; the recording of “The Thirteenth Child,” released in June, was the 11th installment. In 1988, Becky Starobin became Ruders’ manager, a job that has involved arranging commissions (including his third and fourth symphonies) and suggesting, in 2013, that it was time to think about a new stage work.

“We had worked out a lot of plans together,” Becky Starobin said, “and it just felt to me that it was time for Poul to write another opera. But I thought that he should write something very different from what he had written in the past. And I thought a fairy tale might lead Poul to a different area, soundwise.”

Until then, Ruders’ operas had been focused mostly on tragic historical figures or dystopian fiction. His first, “Tycho” (1986), is about Tycho Brahe, the 16th-century Danish astronomer who, despite his notable discoveries, spent his final years in exile and lived to see some of his theories upended by his assistant, Johannes Kepler. Although the score remains available from his publisher, it has not been recorded, and Ruders has all but disowned it.

“It bombed and disappeared without a trace,” said Ruders, who noted that he was working with an inexperienced librettist. “I was not exactly young — I was 36 — but I’d never written an opera before.”

Its successor, “Kafka’s Trial” (1990), which mixes incidents from Kafka’s life with parts of his posthumous novel, “The Trial,” fared better. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which brought the grim world of Margaret Atwood’s novel to the opera stage — without, as Atwood initially feared, turning the handmaids into a high-kicking chorus line — was more successful still. A mixed response greeted “Selma Jezkova” (2007), the tragic story of a desperate mother who is tried and hanged for murder, inspired by the Lars von Trier film “Dancer in the Dark.”

These are fierce works, about struggle rather than hope, and they focus on principal characters who are at odds with those around them, and with the world. And, for the most part, these operas are etched in a searing chromatic language that suits their wrenching emotions.

“The Thirteenth Child” does have its forbidding moments. The first act revolves around the paranoid King Hjarne and his greedy cousin Drokan — the regent of the neighboring kingdom, who covets both Hjarne’s land and his queen, Gertrude, and whose Iago-like insinuations turn Hjarne against his 12 sons. Some angular vocal writing and cluster-rich orchestration were inevitable.

But although Hjarne and Drokan create the plot’s conflicts, it is Gertrude who provides the human core, sending her sons into exile before Hjarne can have them killed, and later sending her daughter, Lyra — the 13th child of the title — on a quest to find them. Along the way, there is a mishap involving fantastical lilies and ravens, and a magical solution to it that requires Lyra to remain silent for seven years. Gertrude, Lyra and Frederic — Drokan’s selfless heir, who falls in love with Lyra — are responsible for the increasingly lyrical music as the story advances.

“A wall-to-wall atonal piece can be fantastic,” Ruders said. “But if you want a foreground and background, mentally and audibly, you need this juxtaposition between tonality and chromaticism, because that’s where you get the space.”

It was Ruders who chose “The 12 Sons,” the story on which the opera is based. He sent an outline to Becky Starobin, who began writing the libretto on her own. David Starobin at first had no intention of collaborating with them. But he did have suggestions, and after a few months of batting around ideas, they realized that they were collaborating after all. Along the way, the Starobins reconfigured the Grimms’ story, adding the villainous Drokan and deleting an evil second queen, Frederic’s mother.

“There was a really strong pull,” Becky Starobin said, “to make this about family and how families can strengthen each other, or rip each other apart.”

In working with the Starobins, Ruders violated the rule he established in the aftermath of “Tycho”: that his librettists be theater professionals. But David Starobin had long ago gotten a practical education in musical theater from his brother, Michael Starobin, a composer and busy orchestrator for theater, film and television.

“I’ve been following my brother’s career for decades,” David Starobin said, “watching both the good shows he did and the turkeys. He always knew which ones would succeed and which had no chance, and he would enumerate his reasons.”

Ruders, in any case, was pleased — astonished, really, given that this was the Starobins’ first libretto. He said he made few suggestions, and, when he did, the revisions would arrive the next day.

Still, there remained the question of where the work would be staged. The Starobins planned from the start to record it, using the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark. (Ruders lives in Odense, a city of 180,000 southwest of Copenhagen.) Originally, the orchestra was to present the work’s premiere. But all concerned agreed that a premiere at an opera house would be preferable, so copies of the score and a rough mix of the orchestral recording — the singers were recorded later — made the rounds.

As it happened, Santa Fe Opera was searching for a new work for its 2019 summer season, and a finished but unheard opera by Ruders fit the bill. The company and the Odense orchestra worked out an arrangement: The opera house would present the premiere and then ship the physical production — directed by Darko Tresnjak, with sets by Alexander Dodge and costumes by Rita Ryack — to Denmark, where the orchestra will perform it in 2021.

“There were some great advantages for us,” said Brad Woolbright, the director of artistic administration in Santa Fe. “First, Poul’s stature as a composer, and the success that ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ has had. Also, it’s a small cast, and it’s in English. The libretto is very economical, and all of Poul’s music in the opera has both a mysterious quality and a sense of resolution. I think it’s a breakthrough from his darker period, and you have the Starobins to thank for that.”

For the librettists, though, there was some nail-biting as the premiere approached.

“Poul and I were at the dress rehearsal for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’” in Boston, David Starobin said, “and I was kind of overwhelmed. Here’s a large, powerful, complex and obviously very serious piece, dealing with emotions at the very extremes. And I said, ‘Our poor little piece is nothing compared to this.’ But Poul said: ‘No, no, no, no. ‘The Thirteenth Child’ is the polar opposite of this. It’s a feel-good piece!”

Additional Information:

‘The Thirteenth Child’

July 27 through Aug. 21 at Santa Fe Opera; santafeopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/music/thirteenth-child-poul-ruders-santa-fe-opera.html" id="f3f60728-729f-36fd-a200-41b3547c0e5a">The New York Times</a>.

A Rarity for Poul Ruders: A Feel-Good Opera

“My maternal grandfather, who was a humble gardener, loved Verdi and Puccini,” Danish composer Poul Ruders recalled recently. “And when I was 10 or 11, he took me first to see ‘La Bohème,’ and then to see ‘Aida.’”

His half brother, Don Wilson, said the cause was complications of dementia.

Until 10 years ago, long after Johnson had dropped composing for a career as a mathematician, his music was known only by reputation. References to it were found in the writings of composer La Monte Young, who described Johnson as one of his closest musical allies when they were students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Young is a founder of minimalism, a genre of composition marked by repetition, gradual development and sometimes spare harmonies. Some of the most important contemporary composers, including John Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, are at times associated with the movement or at least have incorporated such elements in their work.

Young is credited with composing the first minimalist work, his String Trio of 1958, which unfolded so slowly that listeners focused less on its sequence of notes than on its long, sustained tones and glacial pace.

A year later, Johnson produced “November,” his piano work, which also moves glacially, starting with just two notes — a rising minor third — repeated several times before new material is added, in a process that yielded a flow of individual tones, sustained chords and silences.

Johnson described his compositional method in a 2013 interview with the music magazine The Wire: “I would just sit down at the piano and diddle, and listen, and it would slowly grow, like out of a seed,” he said. “Even now, when I do mathematics, it seems to be that way.”

Johnson’s innovations were repetition and generally consonant harmonies. Young has said that “November” influenced his own six-hour magnum opus, “The Well-Tuned Piano” (1964), considered an early landmark of the genre.

But for the next 50 years “November” was virtually unknown. The path to its revival began in 1992, when Young gave critic and composer Kyle Gann a cassette tape with a partial performance, by Johnson, running 112 minutes.

Gann decided to reconstruct the score, using the tape and a handful of pages that Johnson had sent him detailing many of the work’s motifs as well as performance instructions. Gann performed a tag-team version of the piece with the pianist Sarah Cahill at the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in 2009.

That performance led to a 2013 recording by R. Andrew Lee for Irritable Hedgehog, a new-music label. Gann’s reconstruction has also been recorded by Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen.

Though the score was unknown to most musicians until the release of Lee’s recording, its minimalist qualities — and its influence on Young — have led to a reconsideration of minimalism’s early history.

Dennis Lee Johnson was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 19, 1938, to Leroy Johnson, a building contractor, and Eloise (Jeffcoat) Johnson, a seamstress. His parents divorced before he was 8, and when his mother remarried, the family moved to Canoga Park, California.

In addition to Wilson, his half brother, Johnson is survived by a half sister, Judy Wilson Plouff.

Johnson’s early talent for mathematics earned him a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he completed high school. He enrolled as a math student at the California Institute of Technology in 1956. But after a year he became disillusioned, and although he had studied the piano only casually as a child, he decided to transfer to UCLA to study music.

As part of Young’s iconoclastic circle, Johnson produced works that were often whimsical, like “Din,” in which 40 musicians screamed, clapped their hands and shuffled their feet in a darkened hall. They could also be conceptual, like a piece that consisted of a card containing only the word “Listen.” He continued performing for several years, both on the piano and on the hichiriki, a Japanese double reed instrument.

When Young moved to New York, in 1960, Johnson remained at UCLA, shifting his focus to ethnomusicology and, by 1962, to mathematical study. But he visited New York several times from 1960 to 1965, and played the hichiriki in early versions of Young’s performance group, Theater of Eternal Music.

In 1966, Johnson gave up performing music publicly and began work on his doctorate in math, which he completed two years later. In 1969, he took a two-year position at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he worked for a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Pasadena, California, first as a staff researcher and software developer and then as a consultant.

Among his projects at the lab was the radio mapping of Venus — a mathematical reconstruction of the planet’s surface using radar data. He also taught mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and continued his own research in advanced algebra and geometry.

His 1983 theorem, the Johnson homomorphism, is still studied in the field of geometric topology. After 1995, Johnson began working with Roger C. Alperin, a professor of mathematics at San Jose State University, on theoretical projects having to do with “understanding the symmetries of curves related to their geometry,” as Alperin explained it.

Johnson’s final mathematical work, a collaboration with Alperin, was published in the German journal Beiträge zur Algebra und Geometrie (Contributions to Algebra and Geometry) in January 2016.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/obituaries/dennis-johnson-dead.html" id="54d672dc-1151-359b-aa78-31f1f5e2ef1e">The New York Times</a>.

Dennis Johnson, a composer who in 1959 wrote a trailblazing minimalist work, a six-hour piano meditation of repeated notes and long pauses that went unheard for 50 years before being rediscovered, died Dec. 20 in Morgan Hill, California. He was 80.

Dennis Johnson, Creator of a Rediscovered Minimalist Score, Dies at 80

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Allan Kozinn

Articles written by the author

Ben Johnston, Who Made Microtonal Music Melodic, Dies at 93

A Rarity for Poul Ruders: A Feel-Good Opera

Dennis Johnson, Creator of a Rediscovered Minimalist Score, Dies at 80