Johan Franco

Johan Franco was a composer of Dutch origin who was born in Zaandam on 12 July 1908 and died in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on 14 April 1988. His career spanned the Netherlands and the United States, and his output ranged from the symphony to the carillon, the instrument to which he devoted much of his attention.

He studied law at the University of Amsterdam, but his musical vocation led him to take composition lessons with Willem Pijper. In 1934, following the successful premiere of his First Symphony in Rotterdam, he emigrated to the United States. There he gave a concert devoted entirely to his own works at Town Hall in New York on 15 March 1938, and he became a United States citizen in 1942.

His catalogue is extensive. It includes five symphonies, numerous lyrical concertos, six string quartets and a substantial body of music for solo instruments. From 1952 he devoted himself particularly to the carillon, writing more than a hundred works for it. In his vocal pieces he frequently drew on texts by his wife, Eloise Bauder Lavrischeff. His harmony tends towards polymodality, and in many of his large-scale works he employs a cyclic structure. In 1974 he received the Delius Prize for Ode, a work for male chorus and symphonic band.