Evan Johnson: dust book

To write about dust book is to reflect on silence, and how sounds find their own place in vast amounts of silence. to listen to dust book is to listen to silence, and to the sounds that occur within. A metaphor can assist the process, I believe.

Imagine silences as surfaces. Imagine many kinds of surfaces. Glass, wood, granite, grass, paper, books. Surfaces collect dust, and each surface collects a different kind of dust.

When vibrations move the air, dust flows away from these surfaces and then, slowly, comes to rest again. And the listener remains enchanted by the marginal, minimal movements of the minute particles of dust, flickering through light.

dust book welcomes a similar attitude; listeners (and performers, and the composer, I suspect) attend to the piece, observing and making sense of its convolutions, of ites brief frantic dances, and its slow returns to stillness. The meticulous crafting of its parts hides behind the contemplative attitude that dust book invites. We do not expect movement, we welcome stillness, and, still, we stay open to the beauty of each grain of sound, of each vibration and its rebounds.

Marco Fusi

Interview with Evan Johnson

What is the background to the piece? Why viola d'amore, and it's a great title - but where does it come from?

The title is a bit unusual, for me, in that most of my titles are little snippets of reference to external things—works of art, other (usually medieval-ish) music, literary or philological terminology, etc. etc. But this one is a phrase I just made up. In particular, I’ve been using the words “dust” and “dusty” an awful lot recently in my sketches and sometimes in scores themselves, to refer to a particular type of material I’ve become very fond of in recent years—dry, sparse, particulate—and knowing that this extended work would take the form of a partially separable collection of pieces—a “book”, that is—it seemed like a reasonable title. I meant it to be sort of neutral, maybe as an antidote to my history of titles that definitely draw attention to themselves, but I also think it’s a nice little pair of words.

I also really like what Marco writes in his little text in the CD package, about how the piece reminds him of dust settling on a variety of different surfaces. I think that’s a marvelous way of thinking about how the material of the piece (and some other recent pieces of mine) behaves.

Recorded and mixed by Luca Piovesan at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium in September 2023. Additional mixing by Charlie Sdraulig. Produced and edited by Marco Fusi.