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He
considers
. “ at was intentional,” he
explains. “If I express all my anger, I get
in the way of someone else experiencing
theirs. I want people to have their own
experience. We don’t shy away from
what happened; the brutal part of the
story is present. I believe in oratorio
as a conduit for the universal, so that
means I need to get out of the way.”
Johnson’s insight is particularly pointed
in the interlude “I Am Like You” which
challenges listeners to examine their
own potential for projection of hatred.
“We have the audience members sit for
four minutes with very quiet music,
unadorned, with lots of rests in between,
having to feel the words. Am I like you?
In what way do I allow my fears to be
projected on the ‘other’ to live a sense of
that separate self? People saw the truth
in what happened to Matt Shepard; that
hatred based in fear is real. And we all
experience that.”
Johnson’s compositional style has
been described as “collage,” a pastiche
of disparate in uences with bits of pop,
folk, and jazz coursing through an
essentially classical structure. e work
begins, appropriately for what is fun-
damentally a Passion, with a quotation
from Bach; the opening measures of
Ave
Maria
. e initial choral entrance then
gives way to an idiomatic cowboy song,
which immediately establishes locale.
“I wanted to allow a naturalness for a
modern audience,” Johnson explains.
“ ere is a big part of me that is pretty
straight-up orthodox choral guy. I
trained in Bach. I love those big forms. I
have a foot rmly planted in the canon,
and I could be happy living my life with
them, the Passions and the Elgar things.
e commitment to oratorio was also
there. I am sad to see that form die away.
ere are not many composers writing
oratorio anymore; it certainly isn’t in our
listening palate all that much, so I am
interested in keeping this larger story-
telling medium in play. I also was inter-
ested, for musical and cultural reasons,
to have as broad an audience as possi-
ble invited in. I wanted both musical
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 – MAY 11, 2019
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