Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York during the 1970s, and whose own compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical clarity. What was, died on Tuesday at his home in Paris. He was 85 years old.
His wife and only immediate survivor, performance artist Esther Ferrer, said it was a stroke after long-term emphysema.
Mr. Johnson was a young New York musician in need of income in 1971 when he noticed that the exciting performances he heard downtown were not being covered by local news outlets. He offered to write about the contemporary music scene for The Voice, and he soon started a weekly column.
It was an opportune moment: Art galleries, lofts and places like kitchens were putting on concerts by young veterans like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson became the emerging scene’s chief chronicler.
He wrote in 1983, “Nobody realized at the time that one of the most important genres of serious music of the century was developing, a genre that came to be known as American minimalism, and which was The world will have imitators,” he wrote in 1983, in his last Voice column.
He charts the rise of musical minimalism, including the transformation of local musician Phil Glass into an international phenomenon, but he also documents the radical work of lesser-known figures: YoshiwadaWho sang through massive plumbing pipes. Jim Burton, who developed bicycle wheels; and Elaine Radig, who created extraordinary drones on synthesizers.
“I learned some interesting things about gongs at the Center Street Loft concert on May 30,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 show by young musician Rhys Chatham. “This gong has many different pitches, most of which do not make much sense in terms of the overtone series. Different tones are prominent depending on how the gong is struck. That is when a gong vibrates. When it does, there is a wonderful rush of sound in the room. That loud gongs shake the floor in a certain way. That listening to a gong played alone for more than an hour is one It is an extraordinary experience.
By recounting such extraordinary events in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson gave a national readership access to performances that only an audience of a dozen might attend, and likely never hear again. He saw himself as a participant within the scene, and provided such generous coverage that he became known as “Saint Tom” among musicians. His writings were collected in a 1989 book. the sound of new music, present a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical era. For one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang in the chorus for a rehearsal of Mr. Glass’ landmark opera “Einstein on the Beach.”
But Mr. Johnson also wasn’t afraid to criticize concerts that he thought didn’t work conceptually, or take notes while he slept. Some columns took formal risks. He once devoted a thousand words to a review of “one of the most impressive performances I’ve ever seen”: The Warbling of a Mockingbird on Long Island.
He was among the first writers to use the term “minimal” to describe the mostly repetitive music he heard, and he applied the term to his own compositions, such as the 1971 Hypnotic functions of “An Hour for the Piano.” “I’ve always been very proud of it, because that’s the only word that describes what I’m doing,” he said in a statement. 2014 interview. “I always worked with less material and tried to make simple music.”
In Mr. Johnson’s postmodern “four-note opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — only on the notes A, B, D and E. The first performance, in 1972, had an audience of about 10 people. The opera has since received over 100 productions. for “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked for nearly an hour among a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells, setting them off in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and physical exertion.
In the 1980s, he immersed himself in Euclid’s number theories and Mendelbrot’s fractals, eager to explore new musical structures. His compilations of this period include: “Sane Tunes” Simple, symmetrical patterns, and a series of internal miniatures drawn from “The Chord Catalogue,” a two-hour methodical presentation of the 8,178 chords that can be found in a single octave.
Although underpinned by his mathematical exercises, Mr. Johnson’s music is visceral and comprehensible — and, often, deliberately predictable — rather than absurd. “There’s something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (music) arises naturally from an exploration outside of me, and where everything comes together with a minimum of tinkering (composing),” he says. once wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939 in Greeley, Colo. I was born in a small farming community. His parents, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, were teachers.
When he was about 7 years old, Tom began playing the piano sporadically, and he found a love for music at age 13 under the tutelage of a local piano teacher, Rita Hutcherson, who also encouraged him to compose. Encouraged.
Although many of her peers attended nearby universities, Ms. Hutcherson urged Mr. Johnson to apply to Yale, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1961 and a master’s degree in music in 1967. of As an undergraduate, he attended a seminar with dignitaries. Composer Elliot Carter and 12-tone composition, the vernacular of the Musical Academy, but he found himself embracing repetition and stasis rather than intellectual complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to study privately with experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him find his artistic voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice but struggling to make ends meet, Mr. Johnson moved to Paris in 1983, where new opportunities awaited, as European audiences turned to the new American avant-garde. Were attracted. There he remained a prolific writer, presenting his musical theory in several books. He had been publishing his scores since the 1970s, and maintained an active web presence Video series Explain his music.
Among his major works is the satirical “Riemannoper”, based on excerpts from a famous German music dictionary, which has received more than 30 productions. and a more serious discourse on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But much of Mr. Johnson’s output has remained entirely abstract, including an orchestral work that includes a 360 chord arrangement and a series of recent pieces that systematically explore different rhythmic combinations.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan ended in divorce. He married Miss Ferrer in 1986.
One of Mr. Johnson’s compositions has become canonical in the double bass community: “failed” (1975), an extremely difficult and humorous exercise in which a soloist is instructed to bend difficult passages while reading a long text that self-reflexively comments on the music. “All these pieces had to do with making music as real life,” Mr. Johnson said of the work in one. 2020 Interview. “I wanted the actor to face and deal with an unknown situation and at the same time only in the context of one time.”