Fergus Johnston was born in Dublin and is a music graduate of Trinity College Dublin. He studied composition with James Wilson at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and later privately with the English composer Robert Hanson. While his output is mostly instrumental, he has ventured into the area of computer-assisted music having taken a Masters in Music and Media Technology in Trinity College Dublin. He has also written 2 operas, Bitter Fruit (1992) and The Earl of Kildare (2009). He is a recipient of the 1989 New Music for Sligo Composition Prize and the Arts Council's 1989 Macaulay Fellowship. He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of creative artists.
Fergus Johnston
The underlying principle behind most of my recent instrumental music is the process of change: things accumulate, piling up (often at different speeds), reaching a threshold, and then suddenly the horizon shifts, the landscape changes, and everything is different. My vocal works, by contrast, tend to be more inwardly directed: static rather than dynamic; reflections on the text, rather than illustrations of it.