Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) was a German-American composer. She spent a major part of her life in the United States, as part of the “ultra-modernist” circle of the 1930s alongside Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger. She wrote fifty or so works between 1931 and 1943. Her music is characterised, among other aspects, by her radical approach to experimentation, a use of dissonance as a compositional foundation, and by a widened palette of timbres. Beyer is also recognised as one of the great pioneers of electronic music. Her work Music of the Spheres, considered prophetic in many ways, is the very first work written for electronic instruments by a woman.

– Frédérick Duhautpas –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]