Jenny Olivia Johnson

From NetNewMusic Wiki

1 Biography
2 Major Works
3 Publications
- 3.1 Recordings
4 External Links
5 Listening

Biography

Jenny Olivia Johnson is a composer and music scholar currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Born May 7, 1978 in Santa Monica, California, Jenny moved to New York in 1996 to attend Columbia University. As an undergraduate, Jenny studied composition with Jonathan Kramer, Sebastian Currier, and Tristan Murail, then went on to earn her Masters degree in composition from Manhattan School of Music, where she studied composition with J. Mark Stambaugh and also received considerable guidance from Nils Vigeland. Jenny is currently a Ph.D. candidate in composition and theory at New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she studied composition with Louis Karchin, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mario Davidovsky, and she is also active as an interdisciplinary scholar of music and trauma under the advisement of Jairo Moreno, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Suzanne Cusick, and Avital Ronell. Jenny has also worked with a variety of composers at various festivals and summer masterclasses, including Meredith Monk, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, David Rakowski, Andre Bon, Allain Gaussin, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayers, and Calliope Tsoupakis.

Jenny's music has been featured at such festivals as the New York City Opera VOX: Showcasing American Composers series (2006, 2007), the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at Mass MoCA (2006), the Gaudeamus International Young Composers Meeting in Apeldoorn, Netherlands (2005), and the Bar Harbor Music Festival (2002). She has held residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Conservatoire Americain de Fontainebleau, France, where she won the 2004 Prix de Composition as well as the 2004 Prix Tournon-Branly de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts for a multi-media work involving music and architecture. Her other awards and honors include a 2006 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for her chamber opera "Leaving Santa Monica," and two CAP grants from the American Music Center. She has been commissioned by the Young People's Chorus of New York City, the Voices of Change Contemporary Music Series at Southern Methodist University, the f(x) ensemble, organist Maxine Thevenot, violinist Todd Reynolds, and bassist Eleonore Oppenheim, and her music has also been performed by ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), New York City Opera (under the baton of George Manahan), the Arditti Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, the Manhattan School of Music Composers Orchestra, the orkest 'de ereprijs', the Riverside Symphony, and numerous emerging soloists from the New York metropolitan area. Her choral work "The Smiling Eyes" was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2003, and has also been released commercially on the 2004 Young People's Chorus of New York "Transient Glory" album (produced by Vital Records).

Jenny is currently secretary of First Performance, the new music series at NYU, and was also a founding member of Columbia New Music. She has worked as a music assistant to the composer Chou Wen-chung, and was also a rock drummer in the indie band Renminbi from 2003-05. Jenny is currently a percussionist/analog noise artist in the laptop duo Winter Company with New York/Berlin composer Paula Matthusen.