Dennis Johnson (Composer)

Dennis Johnson (born 1938) is credited as having composed the first truly 'Minimal' composition ‘November’, 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’.

The work has been painstakingly reconstructed from a 1962 (112min) cassette recording, and six pages of the original score, by the composer and musicologist Kyle Gann, 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 has recorded in a five hour version released in 2013 by Irritable Hedgehog Music, receiving good reviews and a renewed interest in this seminal work of minimalism.

Dennis Johnson gave up music around 1962 and moved into mathematics (working for a time at Caltech, the private research university in Pasadena) 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’.

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