Tom Johnson (born November 18, 1939) is an American
minimalist composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and Def ...
.
Early life and career
Tom Johnson was born in
Greeley, Colorado
Greeley is the home rule municipality city that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Weld County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,795 at the 2020 United States Census, an increase of 17.12% since the 201 ...
, where he received a religious education at a
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's ...
church, which has influenced his work. He received two degrees from
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
, a B.A. (1961) and the M.Mus. (1967), after which he studied privately with
Morton Feldman in
New York. From 1971 to 1983 he was a music critic for
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the cr ...
, writing about new music, and an anthology of these articles was published in 1989 by Het Apollohuis under the title ''The Voice of New Music''. During this period he also composed four of his best known works: ''
An Hour for Piano'' (1971), ''The Four-Note Opera'' (1972), ''Failing'' (1975) and ''Nine Bells'' (1979). After 15 years in New York, he moved to
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...
where he lives with his wife, the artist
Esther Ferrer
Esther Ferrer (born 1937 in San Sebastián, Spain) is a Spanish performance artist. Ferrer received Spain's National Award for Plastic Arts (1999), the Marie-Claire Prize for Contemporary Art in France, and the Velázquez Plastic Arts Prize.
Hi ...
.
Johnson considers himself a minimalist composer, and was the first to apply this term to music in his article "The Slow-Motion Minimal Approach”, written for
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the cr ...
in 1972. His minimalism is of a formalist type, depending mostly on logical sequences, as in the 21 ''Rational Melodies'' (1982), where he explores procedures such as accumulation, counting, and isorhythm.
After the ''Rational Melodies'', he developed more complex techniques using mathematical notions. This began with the collection of ''Music for 88'' (1988), where he applied ideas of
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (; grc-gre, Ἐρατοσθένης ; – ) was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandr ...
,
Euler
Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ...
,
Mersenne
Marin Mersenne, OM (also known as Marinus Mersennus or ''le Père'' Mersenne; ; 8 September 1588 – 1 September 1648) was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for ...
and
Blaise Pascal. Later he collaborated with living mathematicians, particularly Jean-Paul Allouche, Emmanuel Amiot,
Jeff Dinitz
Jeffrey Howard Dinitz (born 1952) is an American mathematician who taught combinatorics at the University of Vermont
The University of Vermont (UVM), officially the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is a Public university, ...
and Franck Jedrzejewski. With them he explored the notions of self-similar melodies (''Loops for orchestra'', 1998), tiling patterns (''Tilework'', 2003), and block designs (''Block Design for Piano'', 2005), along with homometric pairs (''Intervals'', 2013).
Johnson also introduces text and visual images to produce a theatrical atmosphere close to
performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
. The librettos for his operas, which he almost always writes himself, describe what takes place in the music in an objective manner, somewhat reminiscent of
Pirandello. For example, in ''The Four-Note Opera'', the chorus proclaims “There are three choruses in this opera. This is the first one. The second one will be almost like this one, but somewhat shorter
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Words intervene in many of his works, generally via a narrator, who explains pedagogically how the music is made, as is the case in ''Eggs and Baskets'' (1987) and ''Narayana’s Cows'' (1989). From 1988 to 1992, Johnson worked on the ''Bonhoeffer Oratorio'' for two choruses, soloists and orchestra, using exclusively texts of the German pastor and theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945). The association of text and music led Johnson to write numerous radio pieces, most often for René Farabet (
France Culture) and for
Klaus Schöning (
WDR). Some humor often emerges in these pieces, due to a light touch of absurdity, as the music presents itself as if giving a course in music.
The visual also plays an important role in ''Nine Bells'' (1979), a piece written for nine bells suspended in a three by three square, with one bell in the center. The player moves around this square, hitting bells along the way, following paths that are quite varied but always systematic. In ''Galileo'' (1999-2005), bells swing like pendulums in tempos determined by the length of their strings, permitting the composer to make music following the laws of the pendulum, as formulated by
Galileo Galilei
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He ...
in the 17th century.
Since 2000 the work of Johnson has been less concerned with theatricality and turns more toward musical form and mathematics. From about 2004 to 2010 he worked with what he calls “rational harmonies” in pieces like ''360 Chords for orchestra'' (2005) and ''Twelve'' (2008) for piano. Rhythm plays an important role in pieces such as ''Vermont Rhythms'' (2008), ''Munich Rhythms'' (2010), ''Tick-Tock Rhythms'' (2013), and ''Dutch Rhythms'' (2018). Johnson also wrote pieces for jugglers (''Three Notes for Three Jugglers'', 2011; ''Dropping Balls'', 2011), and several more ambitious projects (''Seven Septets'', 2007–2017 ; ''Counting to Seven'', 2013 ; ''Plucking'', 2015).
References
* ''Finding Music. Writings/Schriften. 1961–2018''. (EN/DE). Musiktexte, Köln 2019,
External
Conversations avec Tom Johnson, book of interviews by Bernard GirardJohnson, Tom (1989). ''The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982 -- A Collection of Articles Originally Published by the ''''
Village Voice''
Tom Johnson biographyTom Johnson Editions 75Some Observations on Tiling Problemsby Tom Johnson
An Hour for Piano streamed onlineproduced by
Irritable Hedgehog Music
Irritable Hedgehog Music is a Kansas City-based record label, focused primarily on minimalist and electroacoustic music.
History
Irritable Hedgehog Music was original organized as the publishing imprint for David D. McIntire's compositions. The i ...
Lovely Music Artist: Tom JohnsonNewMusicBox.org: Tom Johnson answers:"What role has theory played in your compositions and how important is it for people to know the theory behind the music in order to appreciate it?"
NewMusicBox.org: View From The East: An Old FriendBy Greg Sandow © 2003 NewMusicBox
"Tiling In My Music"Podcast in which Tom Johnson talks about his compositional methods, and the influence that John Cage and Morton Feldman had upon it.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Tom
1939 births
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
American male classical composers
American classical composers
India Navigation artists
Living people
21st-century American composers
20th-century American composers
20th-century American male musicians
21st-century American male musicians