Daniel Stephen Johnson appears in the following:
Scott Johnson: Pioneering 'Speech-Melody' and Hybridism
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson is an inventor of a technique of generating a piece of music based on recorded speech and approximating it with musical notes.
Ingram Marshall: Hypnotic Clouds and Washes of Sound
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Some of Ingram Marshall's earliest recordings are of solo, semi-improvised performances, playing an Indonesian flute and singing falsetto to an accompaniment of prerecorded electronics and live tape delays. They are mesmerizing—thick, swelling, fragrant clouds of music.
Tyondai Braxton: Carnavalesque and Rapturous Abandon
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
While it is true that Tyondai Braxton's father is the revered composer and improviser Anthony Braxton, their music might as well come from two different planets (neither of which is Earth). Light-years away from his father's liberated, happily baffling ensemble experiments, Braxton fils sounds more like a long-lost son of Zappa, his compositions as gaily colored, as rigidly constructed, and as outrageously, extravagantly pop as a life-size sculpture in Lego blocks.
Michael Gordon: A Rare Balance of Exquisite Distortion
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The Bang on a Can collective—Michael Gordon, wife Julia Wolfe, and fellow Martin Bresnick student David Lang—took a shared fascination with modernist dissonance, minimalist process, and rock volume, and turned it into a new kind of New York institution. They founded festivals and a record label, and collectively composed evening-length works like the oratorio Lost Objects (2001) and the opera Carbon Copy Building (1999).
Phil Kline: Cascades of Vigorous, Multi-Dimensional Sound
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Phil Kline is a composer of the Bang on a Can generation, championed by that collective and sharing with them good deal of common aesthetic ground, fusing an experimental sensibility and minimalist processes with rock sonics and vigor.
Sebastian Currier: On the Verge of Dissolution and Disorder
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Like many of his contemporaries, Sebastian Currier approaches classical music with a sort of double-consciousness—infatuated with its traditions, but well aware of its limitations. Is rock music to blame?
Angélica Negrón: Infusing Magic into the Delicate and Remote
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Angélica Negrón's music is a whisper. A young composer, she has crafted a small oeuvre of concert works, each suffused with a kind of compassion, as if regarding something very small and delicate, but without condescension. She samples tiny noises, seemingly trivial sounds, and turns them into music.
Missy Mazzoli: Raising Vacillation to High Art
Monday, February 06, 2012
Perhaps only an artist with Missy Mazzoli's self-evident clarity of purpose could have raised vacillation to an art form. Her early mentor Meredith Monk toys with handfuls of pitches, making slight variations, but playfully as well as meditatively. It's the tension created by the relentless forward motion of Mazzoli's music, that ticking pulse, that gives the music the sense of a choked-up faltering between pitches.
Aaron Jay Kernis: A Colorist of Dynamic Proportions
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Paola Prestini: Composition as Poetry and Choreography
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Judd Greenstein: Pulsating Complexity with Indie-Classical Populism
Friday, February 03, 2012
Paul Moravec: Mining Tonality for New Intricacies
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Derek Bermel: Travels in Ethnomusicology
Monday, October 17, 2011
After his clarinet was stolen from a Paris phone booth, Derek Bermel explains, he gave up busking to become a goatherd in the south of the country. He has studied the music of Yemen in Jerusalem, the music of Thrace in Bulgaria, choro music in Brazil, and in Ghana the music of a xylophone-like instument called the gyil, and conducted a choir of emotionally disturbed boys at a residential center in New York City.
Nico Muhly: At the Intersection of the Vibrant and Sacred
Monday, October 10, 2011
Nico Muhly has already managed to build not one, but around three or four careers for himself as a composer. With his work on movie scores and indie-rock albums, he has one toe inching towards pop-culture recognition, while keeping one foot firmly in the classical mainstream with a substantial body of pieces composed for the likes of the New York Philharmonic and the English National Opera.