Ben Johnston (composer)
Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (March 15, 1926 – July 21, 2019) was an American contemporary music composer, known for his use of just intonation.
[2] Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia, and taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1951 to 1986, before retiring to North Carolina.
During his time teaching, he was in contact with avant-garde figures such as John Cage, La Monte Young, and Iannis Xenakis.
[3] Johnston's students included Stuart Saunders Smith, Neely Bruce, Thomas Albert, Michael Pisaro, Manfred Stahnke, and Kyle Gann.
Though Johnston decided he did not have sufficient time to prepare for such studies, he did go to New York for several weeks and assisted, along with Earle Brown, in the production of Cage's eight-track tape composition, Williams Mix.
[1] Unskilled in carpentry and finding electronics unreliable, Johnston struggled with how to integrate microtonality and conventional instruments for ten years.
[12]He received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and the Humanities in 1966, two commissions from the Smithsonian Institution, and the Deems Taylor Award.
[14] He is best known for extending Harry Partch's experiments in just intonation tuning to traditional instruments through his system of notation.
In these works he formed melodies based on an "otonal" eight-note just-intonation scale made from the 8th through 15th partials of the harmonic series, or its "utonal" inversion.
Johnston's method is based on a diatonic C major scale tuned in JI, in which the interval between D (9/8 above C) and A (5/3 above C) is one Syntonic comma less than a Pythagorean perfect fifth 3:2.
The three conventional white notes A E B are tuned as Ptolemaic major thirds (5:4, Ptolemy's intense diatonic scale) above F C G respectively.
Johnston introduces new symbols for the septimal ( & ), undecimal (↑ & ↓), tridecimal ( & ), and further prime extensions to create an accidental-based exact JI notation for what he has named "extended just intonation".
[20] Though "this notation is not tied to any particular diapason" and the ratios between pitches remain constant, most of Johnston’s works used A = 440 as the tuning note, making C 264 hertz.
The perfect fifth above D (A + , 27/16) is a syntonic comma (81/80 or 21.5 cents) higher than the just major sixth above C (A ♮ , 5/3), [ 19 ] 27/16 ÷ 9/8 = 3/2.