D O U G L A S . J O H N S O N

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in March, 1997.

Douglas Johnson

Listening into the future of an idea

Listening is critical to Associate Professor of Music Douglas Johnson. The composer, violinist, and conductor says listening is obviously important in learning to appreciate music, but it is also essential in performing and creating it. "Composing," he contends, "is listening into the future of an idea. It's listening to what's there and listening to what might come after it in your mind," he says. "Really good listening is tantamount to really fine playing. It is a kind of interior playing of the piece."

Since coming to Trinity nine years ago from his native California to teach composition, music theory, and develop group music-making opportunities for Trinity instrumentalists, Johnson has earned the respect of his students and colleagues alike for his musical versatility, enthusiasm, and his creative pedagogical skills. "He's an outstanding member of the faculty and of the department," says his colleague, Professor of Music John Platoff. "He has an unquenchable enthusiasm and love for music and for sharing it. He's a fine conductor and keyboardist; he sings, substitutes as a violinist in the Hartford Symphony, and knows an immense amount of music. As a teacher, he's able to figure out what a student wants to do and helps him or her do it. He's just remarkable!"

All of music's relationships in the scale

To create their own music, students in Johnson's composition classes perform exercises that allow them to "listen into" musical structures that are often taken for granted. "We think of the scale as going from do to do. It's a list and that's all. But actually, embedded in the scale are all the relationships of music. I teach the scale as if it were a physical space in which you move. There are almost magnetic attractions in parts of those spaces. I invite my students to start at any degree of the scale and go down or up and have that part of the scale firmly in their minds. There's a sense of energy that can add up into this enormous, big pull into a climactic moment in a piece," Johnson describes. He also gives his students compositional problems to solve and, through these exercises, a "toolbox" of solutions to use, such as discerning when a musical phrase is completed.

Johnson, who points to several generations of professional musicians on both sides of his family, studied composition at the Musikhochschule in Vienna for two years before earning his master's and doctoral degrees in composition from the University of California at Berkeley. He became a church organist at the age of 16, a choirmaster shortly thereafter, and worked as a freelance musician in California for 14 years before joining Trinity's faculty. He has composed pieces for orchestra, chorus, chamber music, and virtuoso solo performers. Earlier this month, the Berlin Saxophone Quartet gave the premiere performance of a new Johnson piece at the Old State House as part of Trinity's "First Thursday" performance series there. Currently, the composer is at work on songs, a string quartet, and an opera.

Johnson does not restrict his composing to music alone. Several times a year, he hosts lunches and dinners for students and former students at his home in Hartford's South End where he indulges his love of cooking, "composes" a meal, and talks about music in a more relaxed setting.

Awe close to worship

Exposure to the rudiments of the craft and of composition enhances students' appreciation of all music, Johnson believes. "It creates downright awe that is close to worship when you've tried to compose something yourself and then you encounter a really well-made piece from any tradition. A beautiful Duke Ellington tune can have the same aesthetic impact as a fugue of Bach or a modest little miniature by Debussy: you listen to any one of them and think, how could anyone do that? It's so perfect."

Students in Johnson's classes develop their own musical ideas into compositions and simultaneously gain new appreciation for music. Individualized Degree Program (IDP) student Elizabeth Joyce '99, an organist who has already had a career as an attorney, is a music and religion major. She departed from conventional harmony and composed a piece for trumpet and organ using the more dissonant quartal harmony, then performed it in the Composers' Seminar Concert last spring. "I've done a lot of performing in church and have made presentations as a lawyer. But performing that piece was even more exciting. It was mind-boggling," she remembers. Music major Stuart Wolferman '97 plays piano, sings, is director of the student group the Accidentals, and is president of The Chapel Singers. "Professor Johnson makes you understand the rules in classical music and what those rules have to do with modern music and jazz. There are a lot of exceptions to the rules, but you've got to know the rules. He's really energetic and he makes you like what you're doing."

For Johnson teaching is simply conveying his love for what is the passion of his life. "I teach music as a healing art, something that has the power to inform your life, for as long as you live, providing marvelous perspectives on time, and relationship, and sense of being in a place," he observes. "For me, music is good for getting deeper, better, more human."

-- Suzanne Zack

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