Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York within the Nineteen Seventies and whose personal compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical readability, died Tuesday at his house in Paris. He was 85.
His spouse and solely quick survivor, performer Esther Ferrer, stated the trigger was a stroke after long-term emphysema.
Mr. Johnson was a younger New York composer in want of an revenue in 1971 when he observed that the stirring performances he heard downtown weren’t coated by native information shops. He supplied to put in writing concerning the modern music scene for The Voice and shortly started a weekly column.
The timing was proper: Artwork galleries, lofts and venues just like the Kitchen had been internet hosting concert events by younger experimentalists like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson grew to become the chief chronicler of the rising scene.
“Nobody realized on the time that probably the most vital genres of significant music of the century was growing, a style that will grow to be referred to as American Minimalism and that will discover imitators world wide,” he wrote in 1983. in his newest voice column.
It charts the rise of musical minimalism, together with the transformation of native composer Phil Glass into a world phenomenon, but additionally paperwork radical work by lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wadawho sang via huge water pipes; Jim Burton, who perfected bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncommon synthesizer drones.
“I discovered some attention-grabbing issues about gongs on Could 30 at a loft live performance on Middle Road,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 present. of the younger composer Rhys Chatham. “These gongs have many alternative pitches, most of which don’t make a lot sense by way of the overtone collection; that completely different tones stand out in accordance with the way wherein the gong is struck; that when the gong made a crescendo, an exquisite high-pitched whistle stuffed the room; that loud gongs vibrate the ground in a particular means and put a wierd cost within the air; that listening to a gong performed alone for over an hour is a rare expertise.”
By describing such excessive occasions in real looking, observational prose, Mr. Johnson gave a nationwide readership entry to performances that is perhaps attended by solely a dozen listeners and sure by no means to be heard once more. He noticed himself as a participant within the scene and offered such beneficiant protection that he grew to become identified amongst composers as “St. Tom.” His writings, collected within the 1989 ebook “The Voice of New Music”, provide a uniquely intimate portrait of an thrilling musical period; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sings within the rehearsal refrain of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera, “Einstein on the Seaside.”
However Mr. Johnson additionally wasn’t afraid to criticize concert events he thought did not work conceptually, or to notice when he fell asleep. Some columns took a proper danger. He as soon as devoted a thousand phrases to reviewing “probably the most spectacular performances I ever heard”: the chatter of a Lengthy Island mockingbird.
He was among the many first writers to make use of 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 hypnotic 1971 work “A Piano Lesson”. “I’ve all the time been very pleased with it as a result of it is the one phrase that actually describes what I do,” he stated in 2014 interview. “I’ve all the time labored with diminished materials and tried to make easy music.”
In Mr. Johnson’s dry postmodern “4-Observe Opera,” a quartet sings aria after aria—simply the notes A, B, D, and E. First efficiency in 1972. there was an viewers of about 10 individuals; since then, the opera has obtained greater than 100 productions. For “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked amongst a community of suspended burglar alarm bells for practically an hour, urgent them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and bodily exertion.
Within the Eighties, he immersed himself in Euclid’s quantity theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, keen to find new musical constructions. His compositions from this era embrace “Rational Melodies”, a collection of charming miniatures constructed from easy, symmetrical patterns, and The Chord Catalogue, a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that may be present in an octave.
Though underpinned by his mathematical workout routines, Mr. Johnson’s music is intuitive and understandable—and sometimes consciously predictable—reasonably than advanced. “There’s one thing significantly satisfying about tasks the place the logic (of the music) appears to come up naturally from some discovery exterior of me, and the place the whole lot comes along with minimal tinkering (of composing),” he as soon as wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939. in Greeley, Colorado, a small farming neighborhood. His dad and mom, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, had been lecturers.
When he was about 7 years previous, Tom started taking part in the piano often and found his ardour for music on the age of 13 below the tutelage of an area piano instructor, Rita Hutcherson, who additionally inspired him to compose.
Though a lot of his friends attended close by universities, Mrs. Hutcherson insisted that Mr. Johnson apply to Yale, the place he obtained a bachelor of arts diploma in 1961. and M.A. in Music in 1967. As a scholar, he participated in a seminar with the distinguished composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the music academy, however discovered himself embracing repetition and stasis as a substitute of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to check privately with experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him discover his inventive voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice however struggling to carry out his personal work, Mr. Johnson left for Paris in 1983, the place new alternatives awaited him as European audiences had been drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific author, theorizing his personal music in a number of books. He has been publishing his personal scores since 1970. and keep an energetic net presence with video series clarification of his music.
His main works embrace the satirical Riemannian Opera, based mostly on excerpts from a well-known German musical lexicon, which obtained greater than 30 productions; and a extra severe oratorio based mostly on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However a lot of Mr. Johnson’s output stays resolutely summary, together with an orchestral work that lays out a collection of 360 chords and a collection of latest items that systematically discover completely different rhythmic combos.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan resulted in divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One among Mr. Johnson’s compositions has grow to be canonical within the double bass neighborhood: “failed” (1975), a fiendishly troublesome and hilarious train wherein the soloist is instructed to bow to troublesome passages whereas studying a protracted textual content aloud that self-reflexively feedback on the music. “All these items are about making music as an actual life,” Mr. Johnson stated of working in a Interview for 2020. “I needed the performer to face an unfamiliar state of affairs and cope with it as greatest as potential in a one-off context.”
