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.