Keith Johnson's Page

In 2008-9, I was composer-in-residence in a neurobiology lab. There, they use a tiny nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, as a model organism as a way of interrogating the cellular mechanisms of communication between the brain and the muscle, expressed as locomotion. I wrote two bodies of work, one of which is A book of mutants, many of which I have posted here, played by Philip Howard. They are all 'mutants' of the Bach C major Prelude from Book 1 of the Well-tempered Clavier: I made systemic changes at root level, then let those changes play themselves out at the musical surface of the work. This was inspired by the use of differing genetic mutants of c. elegans, many of which produce changes to the animal's locomotion; I concentrated likewise on the patterning and the way the Bach progresses. Some are 'transgenic' mutants which contain harmonic and melodic information from other pieces in the rigid structure and patterning of the Bach.

The other pieces here are from Palpitation and Chimaera, two works I made for Fran Barbe Dance, a Butoh-inspired company, and from Someone else's inner voice, an album of ambient/electronica.