Biography:

Scott Johnson (May 12, 1952 – March 24, 2023) was an American composer known for his pioneering use of recorded speech as musical melody, and his distinctive crossing of American vernacular and art music traditions, making extensive use of electric guitar in concert works, and adapting popular music structures for art music genres such as the string quartet. He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship,^[1] and a 2015 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.^[2]

Education and background

Composer Scott Johnson was born on May 12, 1952 in Madison, Wisconsin.^[3] He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, majoring in visual arts, and dividing his time between visual arts and music. In 1975 he moved to New York City and became involved in the thriving art scene in downtown Manhattan. He initially focused on the visual arts, including sculpture, performance, and installation art, with shows at Artists Space and The Franklin Furnace. He also began to play guitar in other people’s projects, working with such artists as Laurie Anderson and Rhys Chatham. Eventually his increasing use of manipulated audiotape in his performance and installation work led to a re-engagement with music, and he began to perform his own compositions at venues including The Kitchen, the premier avant-garde music, dance, and performance art space of the time.

John Somebody and early work

Johnson’s 1982 work John Somebody for electric guitar and recorded speech is an early example of speech melody framed in tonal harmony. It is the first instance of an instrumental score based on the melodies of spoken phrases, and used as an accompaniment to those recorded phrases. It is named for the opening tape loop of a single female voice, repeating these phrases, which are then imitated by layered guitars:

You know who’s in New York?

You remember that guy… J-John somebody?

He was a– he was sort of a–…

Johnson’s early works were created long before the advent of digital music editing. Creating tape loops like this meant actually cutting and splicing long strips of magnetic tape into loops, running them through a player to dub onto a destination tape. Modern digital audio sampling technology allows for a far more efficient process. For example, a 2015 work, Mind out of Matter, contains more than 2,500 words. Johnson’s technique of transcribing speech melodies for use in instrumental scores has since been used by a number of composers, including Jacob Ter Veldhuis, Robert Davidson, Florent Ghys, and Steve Reich.^[4][5][6][7]

Johnson listed three influences for his invention of this technique: Messiaen‘s transcription of bird songs, call and response in American blues, and the early speech tape loop works of Steve Reich, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966).^[8][9][10] Those works used looped speech, but did not involve any instrumental writing derived from the speech. Reich later adopted Johnson’s speech transcription technique for Different Trains (1986) and subsequent speech sampling works.

During the same years that John Somebody was being written, Johnson composed Five Movements, a 30 minute work for solo electric guitar and live electronic processing, using the pitch-shifting capabilities of an Eventide Harmonizer. John Somebody is performed as a work for solo electric guitar and a prerecorded backing track, and together with Five Movements it was a staple of Johnson’s solo performances in America and Europe.^[11][12] The Eventide Harmonizer was also used to create the tape tracks for two other works for solo guitar and tape, No Memory and U79, which used electronically altered voice sounds rather than comprehensible speech.

Credits: