Ben Johnston

A. S. U. C. Keynote Address

BEING HERE reminds me pointedly of the A.S.U.C. meeting in St. Louis in 1967 when the membership rejected the narrower focus of many of its Founding Members and set itself to represent the actual state of American music as reflected in colleges and universities. I remember in particular the aggressive stand of Peter Yates, who very strongly pushed for a broad and representative society. It was especially memorable for me because Peter was chairing a panel on Microtonality which was the first time I had publicly spoken about the then recent change in my work which set me upon the path I have followed ever since. I suppose what I have in mind is to reassert something of that moment for us here. But all any of us can do is to state where he individually is, at any given moment. I cannot presume to sound a keynote for American music in general, or even for this society in particular. What I must do is to make my own position as clear as I can, and hope that this will resonate in other minds. My principal compositional technique, extended just intonation, has its roots in the radical departures of Claude Debussy, whose harmonic language approximates as well as can be in equal temperament a movement from overtone series to overtone series, with an emphasis upon higher partials. There is some mixing of series polychordally and some evidence of the use of a principle of inversion, which generates a system of otonality/utonality analogous to Harry Partchs. In contrast, Arnold Schoenberg, both in his atonality and in his serial pitch usage, seemed to be intent upon exploiting the unused portions of a closed system of pitches. His work is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the first example of a compositional technique which takes the twelve-tone tempered scale for exactly what it is. In all earlier music it represents an acoustical compromise to facilitate instrumental design while still making possible extensive modulatory flexibility. Schoenberg is an example of a radical thinker motivated strongly by a claustrophobic sense of nearly exhausted resources. Debussy, in sharp contrast, seems motivated by an expansion of harmonic resources and a greatly widened horizon. But for Debussys revolution to have been achieved fully, the tempered scale would have had to go, in favor of extended just intonation, so that the overtone structures would have been unambiguously recognizable as such. The sense of brilliant colors provocatively mixed which