Dennis Johnson (composer)

Dennis Lee Johnson (November 19, 1938 – December 20, 2018) was a mathematician and minimal composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces. which was written for solo piano in 1959 and later revised. The creation of November was inspired by Johnson’s UCLA college friend La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings, written in 1958. November is a pensive piano piece that runs for nearly six hours and predates all other known minimalist works in its use of additive process and diatonic tonality. Part of it was recorded by Johnson in 1962 on audio cassette. November was in return an inspiration for Young’s later 1964 The Well-Tuned Piano work. Young gave, from his archive, a cassette copy of November to composer, musicologist and writer Kyle Gann. From it Gann made a new recording of it, as well as producing six pages of the original score. Gann first performed a four-and-a-half-hour version in 2009 with Sarah Cahill and he 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, after receiving good reviews. In 2017 the Dutch piani