DOUGLAS BRUCE JOHNSON was born in Oakland, California in 1949. He studied with Charles Fulkerson, Floyd Glende, Charles Moon and Leon Wagner at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. From 1970 to 1972 he studied in Vienna with Friedrich Neumann at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst. Completing his BA in Music cum laude at Humboldt State University in 1974, he performed in chamber groups and orchestras. In 1980 he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, performing as a violinist in the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano, who commissioned his first large orchestral works, and in the Oakland Symphony under Calvin Simmons. He entered graduate school in 1983, earning the Ph.D. in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, where he worked with composers Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson, and with conductor Michael Senturia.

In 1988 he joined the music department at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His compositions have delighted audiences across the United States, as well as Europe and Latin America. 

The composer reveals: "My music seeks an immediate connection with listeners' emotions, with their bodies, and with their minds. I compose for "now — to communicate with people around me in the big "here" that our world is. My compositions are based in the sound of acoustic instruments and the human voice. I seek to emphasize the emotional appeal that sounds have for the listener, whatever their background or training. The expressive effect produced by familiar musical content in unexpected contexts gives my music its sustaining energy. Rooted in European traditions, my music still sounds American. It is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, between "old" sounds and "new" sounds. I do not adhere to any prevailing school of compositional style, though I freely acknowledge influences from four 20th century greats: Berg, Bartók, Britten and Copland."

last updated March 29, 2020
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