Evan Johnson's dust book is a 50-minute work for solo viola d'amore in six movements, composed in 2022-2023 and premiered by Marco Fusi at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 2023. Johnson describes it as his longest and most ambitious piece to date—a fragile, extended meditation on resonance, silence, and sonic detail. The title reflects Johnson's recent aesthetic preoccupations: "I've been using the words 'dust' and 'dusty' an awful lot recently in my sketches and sometimes in scores themselves, to refer to a particular type of material I've become very fond of in recent years—dry, sparse, particulate—and knowing that this extended work would take the form of a partially separable collection of pieces—a 'book', that is—it seemed like a reasonable title."
Fusi's liner notes provide a poetic key to the work: "To write about dust book is to reflect on silence, and how sounds find their own place in vast amounts of silence. To listen to dust book is to listen to silence, and to the sounds that occur within. Imagine silences as surfaces. Imagine many kinds of surfaces. Glass, wood, granite, grass, paper, books. Surfaces collect dust, and each surface collects a different kind of dust. When vibrations move the air, dust flows away from these surfaces and then, slowly, comes to rest again. And the listener remains enchanted by the marginal, minimal movements of the minute particles of dust, flickering through light."
Johnson's music since 2012 has been "extremely spare, fragmentary, silence-filled." As he notes, his aesthetic embraces "music as an almost accidental epiphenomenon of marginal and usually unnoticed processes occurring in the shadows." The piece unfolds in sparse gestures and suspended time, with sound emerging tentatively—shaped as much by absence as by presence.
The work was recorded at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, where Fusi is an artistic researcher in the HIPEX research cluster. The recording was made in September 2023 by Luca Piovesan, with additional mixing by Charlie Sdraulig and production/editing by Fusi himself.
