Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the revival of avant-garde music in central New York throughout the Nineteen Seventies, and whose personal compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical readability, died Tuesday at his residence in Paris. He was 85 years previous.
His spouse and solely fast survivor, efficiency artist Esther Ferrer, stated the trigger was a stroke following long-term emphysema.
Johnson was a younger New York composer in want of revenue in 1971 when he realized that the thrilling performances he was listening to downtown weren’t being coated by native media shops. He volunteered to put in writing concerning the modern music scene for The Voice and shortly started a weekly column.
It was an opportune second: artwork galleries, lofts, and venues just like the Kitchen hosted concert events by younger experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Johnson grew to become the rising scene’s main chronicler.
“Nobody realized on the time that some of the vital genres of great music of the century was growing, a style that may turn out to be often called American minimalism and that may discover imitators all through the world,” he wrote in 1983, in his closing Voice column .
He charted the rise of musical minimalism, together with the transformation of native composer Phil Glass into a global phenomenon, but additionally documented the unconventional work of lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wadawho sang by way of large pipes; Jim Burton, who enlarged bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created mysterious drones on a synthesizer.
“I realized some attention-grabbing issues about gongs on Might 30 at a Middle Avenue loft live performance,” Johnson wrote of a 1973 live performance by younger composer Rhys Chatham. “These gongs have many various tones, lots of which do not make a lot sense by way of harmonic tone collection; that totally different tones stand out relying on how the gong is struck; that when a gong makes a crescendo, a beautiful, high-pitched sound flows by way of the room; that loud gongs vibrate the ground in a particular manner and place an odd cost within the air; that listening to gongs, performed alone for greater than an hour, is a rare expertise.”
By describing these extravagant occasions in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson supplied the nationwide studying public with entry to performances that may very well be seen by solely a dozen listeners, and presumably by no means heard once more. He noticed himself as a participant within the scene and coated it so generously that he grew to become identified amongst composers as “São Tom”. His writings, collected within the 1989 e-book “The Voice of New Music”, provide a uniquely intimate portrait of an exhilarating musical period; for a memorable column, Johnson sang within the refrain of a rehearsal of Glass’s landmark opera, “Einstein on the Seaside.”
However Johnson additionally wasn’t afraid to criticize reveals that he thought did not work conceptually, or to put in writing down when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal dangers. He as soon as devoted a thousand phrases to reviewing “some of the spectacular performances I’ve ever heard”: the warbling of a nightingale on Lengthy Island.
He was one of many first writers to start utilizing the time period “minimal” to explain a lot of the repetitive music he heard, and he utilized the phrase to his personal compositions, such because the 1971 work Hypnotic “An hour for piano.” “I’ve all the time been actually happy with it, as a result of it is the one phrase that basically describes what I am doing,” he stated in a 2014 interview. “I all the time labored with diminished supplies and tried to make easy music.”
In Johnson’s dryly postmodern “4 Notice Opera,” a quartet sings arias upon arias — simply within the notes A, B, D and E. The primary efficiency, in 1972, had an viewers of about 10 folks; since then, the opera has acquired greater than 100 productions. To “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked amongst a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for almost an hour, ringing them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and bodily effort.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, he immersed himself in Euclid’s quantity theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, keen to search out new musical buildings. His compositions from this era embody “Rational Melodies”, a collection of fascinating miniatures constructed from easy, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that may be present in a single octave.
Though supported by his mathematical workout routines, Johnson’s music is visceral and intelligible – and infrequently intentionally predictable – relatively than obscure. “There’s something notably satisfying about initiatives the place the logic (the music) appears to come up naturally from some discovery exterior of myself, and the place every little thing comes along with a minimal of (compositional) tampering,” he as soon as stated. he wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colorado, a small farming group. His mother and father, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, have been lecturers.
When he was about 7 years previous, Tom started enjoying the piano intermittently and found his ardour for music at age 13 below the tutelage of an area piano instructor, Rita Hutcherson, who additionally inspired his composition.
Though lots of his classmates attended close by universities, Ms. Hutcherson inspired Mr. Composer Elliot Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of musical academia, however discovered himself embracing repetition and stagnation relatively than cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to check privately with experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him discover his creative voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice however struggling to realize his personal work, Johnson moved to Paris in 1983, the place new alternatives awaited him as European audiences have been newly drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific author, theorizing about his personal music in a number of books. He had been publishing his personal scores because the Nineteen Seventies and maintained an energetic internet presence with a video series elucidating his music.
His major works embody the satirical “Riemannoper”, primarily based on excerpts from a well-known German musical lexicon, which has acquired greater than 30 productions; and a extra critical oratory primarily based on the writings of German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However a lot of Johnson’s output has remained resolutely summary, together with an orchestral work that encompasses a sequence of 360 chords and a collection of current items that systematically discover varied rhythmic mixtures.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to choreographer Kathy Duncan led to divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One in all Mr. Johnson’s compositions has turn out to be canonical within the double bass group: “Failing” (1975), a terrifyingly troublesome and hilarious train during which a soloist is instructed to bow sophisticated passages whereas studying aloud an extended textual content that feedback on the music in a self-reflexive manner. “All of those items have been about making music actual life,” Johnson stated of engaged on a Interview 2020. “I wished the artist to face an unknown scenario and take care of it in one of the best ways potential, in a singular context.”
