The pioneering microtonalist Ben Johnston has died at the venerable age of 93. Johnston, born in Macon, GA, in 1926, apprenticed with Harry Partch, whom he assisted in the construction and tuning of one-of-a-kind instruments fashioned from scrap. He then studied at Mills College with Darius Milhaud and, later in New York City, with John Cage. Cage encouraged Johnston to drop the idea of writing for newly created instruments and instead to focus on expanding the potentials and perceptions of more traditional sources.

Johnston exceeded even Partch in his experiments with “just intonation,” a method of tuning based on the intervals of the harmonic series. For hundreds of years, equal temperament, in which the intervals of the chromatic scale are distorted to create major and minor scales, with the ability to modulate from key to key, has been the standard in Western music.

However, to get something, you often have to give something up. The compromise of equal temperament is a finite system. Johnston (and Schoenberg before him) realized that by the 20th century the musical resources available through an adherence to equal temperament were on the verge of exhaustion. The exploration of microtones opened up new horizons by allowing for an expandable scale of more than forty divisions to an octave.

Johnston’s great achievement was to take a radical concept and render it in such a way as to make it comparatively accessible to untutored listeners. The pay-off of his String Quartet No. 10 is the realization that (spoiler alert) the entire thing is constructed on the traditional melody “Danny Boy.” His String Quartet No. 4 is based on “Amazing Grace.”

I’ll remember Johnston today, among my featured composers, during my afternoon air shift. We’ll also sample from a new release on Bridge Records, Inc., “Sonata Dementia,” consisting of works by Johnston’s mentor, Harry Partch. Satisfy your thirst for unusual music, between 4 and 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

The ensemble Partch performs “Sonata Dementia:”

Those are some impressive mallets!