Profile: Johanna Beyer

This week we are going to look at the music of Johanna Beyer.

Relatively little about Beyer is known. She emigrated to the US from her native Germany in the 1920s and fell into the community of Ultra-Modernist composers in New York. She used the moniker JM Beyer for the few published pieces she had so that she wouldn't obviously come across as a woman. Much of her music was left unknown and unperformed until fairly recently.

Around the age of 40 as the first percussion ensemble pieces were being written, she took on the novel idea and became one of the most prolific composers of percussion music in the 1930s.

Over the course of all of her music is an exploration of time; she often utilizes the rhythmic aspects of speeding up, slowing down, and polyrhythms to achieve this. Some of her music can be very sparse and calculated, in which a group of different timbres come together to make one overall sound (like an orchestra). Some of her music can be very static, long pre-dating minimalism.

Here are two examples of her music:

Percussion Suite in three movements (1933)

  • Baylor Percussion Group performs Percussion Suite

  • Parts I and III: Listen to the interaction of the instruments with their different timbres. Also, try to listen for speeding up, slowing down, and polyrhythms.

  • Part II: The xylophone solo is written in the "dissonant counterpoint" style developed by the Ultra-Modernists. Here is another example of that style.

Music of the Spheres for three electrical instruments and percussion (1938)

  • The Electric Weasel Ensemble performs Music of the Spheres

  • This was to be part of a larger work (opera) called Status Quo, but this is all that exists.

  • It's not entirely clear what she envisioned for the instruments. The theremin and ondes martenot would have been around by this time. This is the first recording of the work, made in the early 1970s using Buchla synthesizers.

  • This entire piece gradually speeds up / crescendos to a certain point and then returns back to its initial slow state. It is regarded as the first electronic composition by a woman.

Now let's try an activity: Beyer "Shifting Landscapes"