press.
On L'art de toucher le clavecin, 2, from reviews of Richard Craig's recital disc, inward:
Simon Waters (British Flute Society Magazine):
"Evan
Johnson's "L'art de Toucher le clavecin[, 2]" wraps Craig's piccolo in
Sciarrino-like upper-register violin elaborations... ["L'art 2" is] a
beautifully-woven piece, effortlessly holding its own with the classics
on this recording... Richard Craig is a wonderfully authoritative and
articulate performer, and the works here, classics or newly
commissioned, are all important contributions to the flute repertoire.
Anyone interested in the flute's capacities, technical and (more
particularly) musical, with respect to the contemporary end of that
repertoire should buy this disc immediately. It too will become a
classic."
¤
Paul Griffiths:
"Richard
Craig’s collection of flute music (Métier msv 28517), recorded with
close immediacy, places the listener in a wind tunnel whose walls are
of flesh and metal, these sometimes heard as simultaneous alternatives,
sometimes in undulating union. Altogether this is remarkable playing,
remarkable possession of the music by the performer through a wide
range of styles and situations – or of the performer by the music. Hard
to say which. The rhythm of the record is that of the music exerting
itself. [...] Evan Johnson’s l’art de toucher le clavecin, 2
(2009) sends piccolo and violin, playing harmonics, along a line of
intense light, like a horizon between blackness and blackness. It is
wounded light, with occasional groans and gasps from the flautist; it
is also light of – however flickering the sound – immense expressive
reserves." ¤
Tim Rutherford-Johnson:
"...
heart-achingly beautiful ... In its own way, Johnson’s L’art de toucher
le clavecin for piccolo and violin similarly toys with boundaries. But
here the path is more tentatively trodden; at times even the border
itself seems to evaporate. The dialogue – hence the reference to
Couperin’s instructional pamphlet – is between ground and ornament, but
everything is ultra-cautiously proposed, bundled under fantastic layers
of contingencies and securities. It sounds like the recipe for a health
and safety nightmare, but Johnson’s skill is for extracting something
rare and precious from out of such pressure."
¤
On à un quart de voix:
"Johnson's
barely-there cello drones and glistening wind traces proved
particularly gripping in their spectral invocation of Berlioz's
enigmatic performance marking that is commemorated in the work's title."
¤
Composer Timothy McCormack, interviewed by Robert Dahm on his blog, Sound is Grammar:
"Notation
is a delicate balance: it must provide the performer with the
information necessary to perform the piece, but it cannot simply tell
them what to do, just as it cannot pose a problem and then immediately
provide an answer. There must be ambiguity, but it cannot be a riddle;
there must be clarity of intent, but it cannot be a set of
instructions. The most interesting and effective notation, for me,
aspires to be a dynamic force in its own right, apart from the music it
prompts, yet is developed and arrived at by way of sound and structure.
If I may, I think that a particularly good example of a notation that
embodies that which I have been discussing is that of Evan Johnson.
Evan’s notation (to say nothing of his music!) is in my view one of the
more interesting, advanced and important notations that I have come
across. Particularly in works such as Apostrophe 1 (All communication is a form of complaint) and Apostrophe 2 (Pressing down on my sternum),
I feel that Evan has developed something that expresses itself with
what Erick Hawkins might describe as a “violent clarity” while also
confronting the performer with a slew of seemingly incompatible
ambiguities; yet, at no point is the intelligence of his notation
actually contradictory, at no point does the artifice crumble or does
the integrity of the concept buckle. His notation is inseparable from
his music and his convictions, while seemingly problematizing both in
an entirely constructive way. If I believe in anything in this world,
it is Evan Johnson’s notation."
¤
From a profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson:
"I first encountered
Evan’s music in a performance by EXAUDI of his Colophons (“That other
that ich not whenne”) reflecting pool/monument. I think even then I
knew that I’d not heard a surer bet than Evan’s music. It takes
fearsome intelligence and a worldview that recalls the Renaissance
cabinet of curiosities and combines them with a deep sensitivity to
musical traditions, techniques and philosophies that are often seen as
opposite, even aggressively antagonistic to one another.
At
first glance, the
music appears irrevocably tied to a heavy, European tradition of rich
notational determination, formal complexity and hierarchy. But
experience of the music in performance immediately reveals something
else, something lighter, more intangible, more unpredictable, a
willingness to push boundaries beyond the rational, and to do so for
the sake of not knowing and of being simply interested in finding out.
In the middle of Colophons the dense cobwebs of vocal writing stop,
suddenly, leaving only a single, scratching tone on the violin in the
air. It hangs there, precariously, for 10, 20, 30 seconds. Too long.
And then the voices start again, as though nothing had happened. It’s
an extraordinary moment that makes no sense at all in traditional
discursive terms, yet it absolutely nails that piece for me.
Evan’s
music is
something like that: it carries with it an aura of irrationality and
impossibility, a fantasy that almost (but, crucially, not completely)
evaporates with its own expressive coming-into-being."
¤
On Apostrophe
1 (all communication
is a form of complaint):
"The
two musicians
closed the concert with a performance of Evan Johnson's Apostrophe
1 that was
nothing short of remarkable. Seated with backs to the
audience and bass
clarinets in hand, the two worked their way lovingly (but full of the
sort of intelligent violence
Johnson's music calls out for) through
the lengthy fractures of the mutually catalysing, but then ultimately
chaotic destructions,
of the music. The writing is full
of exploratory rhythmic markings and exaggerations of line and tone
that in lesser (composerly)
hands may come off as boorish, but
here, in some obscure but beautiful communion with the reversed
positions of the
performers, it absolutely soared. The playing
felt as if it had been going on since the beginning of time, slowly
melting the core of sound
until something concrete could be found,
in total indifference to any sort of audience that might be listening.
This genuine
inwardness in the performance and the music
made for the most bewitching of spectacles."
¤
"Every moment of the 16 minutes of Evan Johnson’s Apostrophe
1,
for two bass clarinets, sounds impossible: there shouldn’t be room for
such detail in such a narrow margin at the edge of the audible. The
material that might be found in such seams shouldn’t be capable of
sustaining a large-scale symphonic argument. Johnson creates genuine
magic in his music, and this is a beautiful piece. The performers sit
with their backs to us, an instruction that is emphatically made on
acoustic not theatrical grounds, but the combination of visual and
acoustic impressions produces interesting interference patterns in
one’s reception of the piece. The sound is inevitably muffled, but so
are any visual cues as to who might be playing what. The sense of
screening off, on several levels at once, was powerful, and added a
whole new dimension of mystery to the piece. I’m not sticking my neck
out when I say that if he keeps up this standard, Johnson’s music will
be with us for a very long time."
¤
On Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my
sternum):
"Evan Johnson takes such
latent fragility to greater extremes. Apostrophe 2
(pressing down on my sternum),
for flugelhorn and alto trombone, goes beyond the boundaries of the
possible into the realm of the deliberately impossible and
self-defeating. It is related to the bass clarinet duo Apostrophe 1
(all communication is a form of complaint)
like household dust is related to the home. Tiny motes of music drift
in and out of the light, each hinting at the remnants of something long
gone, gently articulating currents of air, the passage of bodies, the
dimensions of a room."
¤
"I wrote last year about
Evan Johnson’s Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum) when it was
premiered in Melbourne. At that time, I found it highly
thought-provoking, but my mental jury was out. The performers were
seated so far from the audience as to be almost inaudible in a boomy
acoustic that eradicated detail and was unflattering to the larger
shapes. Since then, I’d heard both the ABC radio broadcast
(electrifying) and the studio recording made at Radio Bremen in
September (about fifty times more so). But while these documents
represent a fascinating aural experience, there is a live-performance
aspect missing that is, I feel, fairly integral to the piece. When such
recorded detail is so conveniently presented on a nice silver disc, the
sense of cognitive struggle in performance that Johnson’s work embraces
is simply absent.
So it was with great
delight that I witnessed the extraordinary alchemy of Tristram Williams
and Benjamin Marks, in the idiosyncratic acoustic of King’s Place,
reveal this work as a masterpiece. Firstly, this performance was a
great deal more polished than the Melbourne one. Gone were the
deafeningly loud page turns, and gone was the frantic struggle of just
trying to get through it. This was replaced with a tight focus, an
utterly thrilling sense of danger and, of course, about a truckload of
physical effort.
The acoustic of King’s
Place does wonderful things to quiet dynamics. The finer degree of
detailing in dynamic shapes are retained with great fidelity. The
listening experience of Apostrophe 2 this time was one in which the
islands of barely audible, barely stable sonorities violating the
peripheries of perception was maintained, but with an endlessly
fascinating, multifaceted sonic outcome. It’s a shame that the physical
demands of such a work mean that it will never be more than niche
repertoire, as this is music-making of the first order."
¤
On Colophons ("That other that ich
not whenne," reflecting pool / monument):
One of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's "Favorite Concerts of 2008": "The
smothered intricacy of Evan Johnson’s Colophons
still haunts me, as does its startling central gesture. ... Looking
back this was both the best programme and most revealing performance I
heard all year."
¤
On Line of Wreckage:
"The
first piece was the string quartet Line of Wreckage by the American
Evan Johnson (b. 1980). He burdened the Cantus Ensemble with unusual
obstacles. The string instruments' bows are to be treated with as
little rosin as possible, and only loosely strung. The musicians are
then required to play with 'futile energy,' as it says atop the score,
to elicit a dense tissue of sound, from which a single voice
occasionally emerges and then sinks again almost into nothingness."
-- Gazette: Neue Music in NRW,
July/August 2007 edition