Petaluma Profile: Pianist Will Johnson finds inspiration in classics

SSU Music Composition Professor emeritus Will Johnson explains his long and satisfying life as a professional musician and teacher by taking us back to his childhood.

“My mother was a school teacher back in Marietta, Georgia, and she wanted me to learn to play the piano,” he says. “This was encouraged by the music I heard on Sundays at the Southern Methodist church. It held both morning and evening services, with gospel-style hymns from the so-called Pokeberry hymnal. The piano for those services was always played by older women, and I learned to play in their ‘style’ until I became what my mother called a ‘useful performer.’?”

Johnson still loves playing for churches.

“I and am currently the accompanist for both Petaluma’s Christian Scientist and ?Unitarian-Universalist churches,” he says. “I think of myself as the musical catalyst who helps things along during the services.”

Petaluma has been home to Johnson and his wife, Sally, since they moved here in 1970.

“I was hired to teach at SSU because the head of the apartment wanted his faculty to have graduated from UC Berkeley or Stanford,” Johnson says. “My wife had worked in the accounting department at Berkeley, earned her teaching credential and taught in Napa and Petaluma, but when our first born arrived, she became active with the Petaluma Educational Foundation, and stayed involved for 23 years. She is also proud of her direct lineage to Puritan ancestors Myles Standish, and is currently the membership chair of the local branch of the Mayflower Society.”

As a musician, Johnson says he fell easily into computers.

“Pascal (computer programing language) emerged at that time, and even though I was 40 years old, I took a class at Stanford and started teaching programming at SSU,” he says. “At the same time, MIDI appeared as the solution that allowed keyboards to talk with each other. For instance, when Mountain Music came up with cards you could plug into your Apple2E, whatever you play could be stored as keystrokes (on Alpha Centauri). This combining of music and electronics created synthesizers which create sounds from oscillations and wave forms.”

Johnson points out the French/American composer Edgar Varese’s music as a good example of what many call “electronic music.”

“His most famous composition is the Poem Elecronique, an ?eleven-channel tape played through 425 speakers at the ?Philiips Pavilion at the 1958 Worlds’ Fair in Brussels,” Johnson says. “Another example is the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who studied Phonetics, acoustics, psychology, and information theory to help him with his compositions. Many of which allow the performers to elect from several different, but still musically interesting, sequences going on at the same time, resulting in ‘once-in-a lifetime’ musical performances. He also liked to combine human voices with electronic sounds to share musical German, English and Japanese poems simultaneously.”

Citing his BA in music from Princeton, Johnson adds, “I also need to mention Philadelphia-?born modernist composer, Milton Babbitt. As a founding member of the Committee of Direction for the Electronic Music Center of Columbia-Princeton Universities, he is the best example of a super intelligent, very musical, but iconoclastic, modern composer.”

When asked to name his current favorite composer, Johnson quickly replies, “The people of Petaluma should understand that It’s never about style, it’s always about substance and there’s substance in every kind of music. Which is why my top pick has to be Beethoven. He has never stopped being performed. But then there is Wagner as well. He doesn’t write songs. He writes textures and the music soars over the tops of those textures. Wagner creates symphonic poems with the singers floating around on top of it. He was much more than an operatic composer. He was an opera producer for both the performance and the Opera House itself. He was the guy who first directed the theater to dim the lights.”

Now that he’s begun listing favorites, Johnson says he can’t leave out the influence of the Parisian composer, conductor, organist and social influencer Nadia Boulanger.

“A child-prodigy, she rescued her family from debt after her father died,” notes Johnson. “She courted musical controversy at a young age by winning a competition in Rome with a fugue for string quartet, instead of voices. She basically broke the German model for music, insisting that her students should ‘write the music about where you come from.’ She was a lightning rod who would fit in very well in Petaluma today.”

(Contact Gil as gilmansergh@comcast.net)