quotes

“ … almost implausible eloquence … ”


— The Wire

“The language of new music as a branch of the culture industry takes for granted what ‘dust book’ undertakes to work out in tiny steps: the possibility of musical experience under the present conditions […] This awareness could be the basis of a new music.”


— neue musikzeitung

“His music has an indescribable kind of magic, an almost sacred affect … a profound and enchanting aesthetic experience.”


— Tempo: A Quarterly Review of New Music

“Delicacy. Fragility. Tenderness, even. But all these uncanny. Touching but untouchable. Elsewhere.

Each work is decidedly itself, individual, while all plainly come from the same place, the same elsewhere. Each is lacking in rhetoric, having other business than to tell us, even, why it exists.”

— Paul Griffiths

“Among the most interesting and gifted composers of his generation”

— Tempo: A Quarterly Review of New Music

“[conjures] a Beckett-like eloquence from stammers and silences”

— Ivan Hewitt, The Telegraph

“[creates] genuine magic … music [which] will be with us for a very long time”

— Tim Rutherford-Johnson, The Rambler

 

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

Wolke über Bäumen [2016] for baroque violin

Wolke über Bäumen [2016] for baroque violin

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, Acht Brücken (Cologne), London Contemporary Music Festival, Klangbrücken Festival (Hannover), 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, Another Timbre, and HCR, 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.

[ updated september 2022 :: download biographies — pdf ]