Johnny MacMillan is a Canadian-American composer and pianist. Raised in Toronto, Johnny began studying piano at the Royal Conservatory at the age of four, and composition with Alexander Rapoport at the University of Toronto at eleven, going on to complete Bachelor degrees in both Composition and Piano Performance at the Jacobs School of Music under Claude Baker and Emile Naoumoff, with a minor in film scoring under Larry Groupé. Johnny completed a Master’s in Composition at Juilliard under Matthias Pintscher, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Composition at the Eastman School of Music. His most formative mentors at Eastman include Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Matthew Brown, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Robert Morris.
Johnny’s work is deeply inspired by his passion for cinema, literature, history, musicology, and philosophy, as well as his love of other musical traditions, including those of India and Ireland, film music, ambient music, and jazz. His music reconciles a deep love of tradition—his catalog includes a cycle of preludes and fugues in every key for large chamber ensemble, Eine Rittertour—with extended just intonation, spectralism, rare instruments, aleatory, unusual extended techniques, and electronics—as displayed in his most ambitious work, Ödipus der Tyrann, a setting of Hölderlin’s translation of the Sophoclean drama for nineteen players.
His music has been performed in Canada, the United States, Australia, England, Spain, Ukraine, and Austria, by ensembles including the JACK Quartet, Decoda, and the Mivos Quartet. Filmmakers from the London Film School, the Sydney Film School and the Columbia College Chicago often seek him out to score their films.