Composer and critic Tom Johnson, whose Village Voice columns chronicled the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York in the 1970s and whose own work incorporates minimalism and mathematical clarity, spoke Tuesday at his home in Paris. He passed away. He was 85 years old.
His wife and sole survivor, performance artist Esther Ferrer, said the cause was a stroke associated with long-term emphysema.
In 1971, Mr. Johnson was a young, cash-strapped New York composer who noticed that the exciting performances he heard downtown were not being reported in the local press. He asked to write about the contemporary music scene for The Voice and soon began writing a weekly column.
It was perfect timing. Venues like art galleries, lofts, and kitchens hosted concerts by young experimentalists like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson became a leading chronicler of the emerging scene.
“At the time, no one realized that one of the most important genres of serious music of this century was developing. This genre later became known as American minimalism and inspired imitators around the world. ” he wrote in 1983. In his last Voice column, he said:
He charted the rise of musical minimalism, such as the transformation of local composer Phil Glass into an international phenomenon, but also documented radical works by lesser-known figures. Jim Burton zooms in on a bicycle wheel. And Eliane Radigue created eerie drones with synthesizers.
“I learned some interesting things about gongs at the Center Street Loft concert on May 30th,” Mr. Johnson wrote about a 1973 concert by young composer Reese Chatham. “Gongs have a variety of pitches, most of which don't make much sense from a harmonic series standpoint. Depending on how you strike the gong, different tones are noticeable. When the gong crescendos, it makes a nice whooshing high pitch. flows into the room. The large gong vibrates the floor in a special way and gives a strange charge to the air. Hearing the gong played alone for over an hour is an extraordinary experience.
By describing such extraordinary events in dry, observational prose, Mr. Johnson gives readers across the country access to performances attended by only a dozen listeners and likely never to be heard again. provided to. He considered himself a participant in the scene and provided coverage so generously that he became known among composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, collected in the 1989 book The Voice of New Music, provide a unique and intimate portrait of a vibrant musical era. In one memorable column, Mr. Johnson performed the chorus during a rehearsal of Mr. Glass's signature opera, “Einstein on the Beach.''
But Mr. Johnson was also unafraid to criticize concerts he considered conceptually unworkable, or to make notes when he fell asleep. I took some formal risks in some of my columns. He once spent a thousand words reviewing the call of the Long Island Mockingbird, “one of the most impressive performances I have ever heard.”
He was one of the first writers to begin using the term “minimal” to describe much of the repetitive music he heard, including his hypnotic 1971 work “Time for Piano.” and applied the word to his own work. “I've always been very proud of it, because that's the only word that really describes what I do,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I have always tried to reduce the material and make simple music.”
In Mr. Johnson's dry, postmodern “four-note opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias using only the notes A, B, D and E. The audience for the first performance in 1972 was about 10 people. Since then, more than 100 productions of this opera have been performed. In “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked for nearly an hour through a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells, ringing them in a predetermined order, a combination of geometric precision and physicality. It was a great athletic feat.
In the 1980s, he immersed himself in Euclid's number theory and Mandelbrot's fractals, keen to find new musical structures. His works from this period include Rational Melodies, a series of mesmerizing miniatures built from simple, symmetrical patterns, and a two-hour systematic introduction to the 8,178 chords within an octave. Contains “The Chord Catalog”.
Although backed by mathematical practices, Johnson's music is more intuitive and accessible than esoteric, and is often deliberately predictable. “I find it especially satisfying when the logic (music) comes naturally from discoveries outside of myself, and where everything comes together with minimal (musical) intervention,” he says. once wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939 in the small farming community of Greeley, Colorado. His parents, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, were teachers.
Tom began playing the piano intermittently from around the age of seven, and discovered a passion for music at the age of 13 under the tutelage of local piano teacher Rita Hutcherson, who also encouraged him to compose.
Although many of his classmates attended nearby colleges, Ms. Hutcherson encouraged Mr. Johnson to attend Yale University, where Mr. Johnson earned a bachelor's degree in art in 1961 and a master's degree in music in 1967. As an undergraduate, Mr. Johnson attended seminars at prestigious universities. Admiring composer Elliott Carter, he dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of music academies, but found himself embracing himself. Repetition and stagnation instead of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 and studied privately with experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him find his artistic voice.
After documenting the New York scene on The Voice but having trouble getting his work performed, Mr. Johnson relocated to Paris in 1983, only to discover that European audiences were no longer interested in American avant-garde art. New opportunities awaited him as he began to feel a new fascination with the world. There he continued to be a prolific writer, theorizing about his music in several books. He had been publishing his own sheet music since the 1970s and maintained an active presence on the web with a video series explaining his music.
His major works include the satirical “Riemannoper”, based on excerpts from the famous Dictionary of German Music, and he has produced more than 30 works. and a more serious oratorio based on the writings of German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But much of Mr. Johnson's work remained resolutely abstract, including an orchestral piece that laid out 360 chord sequences and a series of recent pieces that systematically explored various rhythmic combinations.
Mr. Johnson's marriage to choreographer Cathy Duncan ended in divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One of Mr. Johnson's songs is “Failing” (1975), which became a classic in the double bass world. It's a fiendishly difficult and hilarious etude in which the soloist is asked to bow through tricky passages while reading out long passages of reflexive commentary. About music. “All of these pieces were about making music as a reality,” Johnson said of the piece in a 2020 interview. “I wanted the performers to be faced with unknown situations and to deal with them as best as possible in a one-off situation.”
