Dennis Johnson (composer)

Dennis Lee Johnson (November 19, 1938 – December 20, 2018)[1] was a mathematician and a composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces. He is credited as having composed the first truly "minimal" composition November,[2] which was written for solo piano in 1959 (later revised).

November is famous for being the inspiration for Johnson's UCLA college friend La Monte Young's 1964 composition, The Well-Tuned Piano.[3]

The work has been painstakingly reconstructed from a 1962 112-minute cassette tape recording, and six pages of the original score, by the composer and musicologist Kyle Gann,[4] who first performed a four-and-a-half-hour version in 2009 with Sarah Cahill. Gann has produced a new performance score based on the original material that R. Andrew Lee recorded in a five hour version released in 2013 by Irritable Hedgehog Music, receiving good reviews[5][6] and a renewed interest in this seminal work of minimalism. In 2017 the Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen released November as part of his eight-disc Minimal Piano Collection, Vol XXI–XXVIII.

Johnson gave up music around 1962 and moved into mathematics (working for a time at California Institute of Technology, the private research university in Pasadena)[3] leaving this one fascinating and influential work that features many of the elements that would later become the basic staples of 1960s and early 1970s Minimalism.