Tom Johnson (composer)

For other people with the same name, see Thomas Johnson (disambiguation).

Tom Johnson
Johnson, c. 2000
Born	(1939-11-18) November 18, 1939 New York City
Died	December 31, 2024(2024-12-31) (aged 85)
Education	Yale University
Occupations	Composer Music critic
Organizations	The Village Voice

Tom Johnson (November 18, 1939 – December 31, 2024) was an American minimalist composer who lived in Paris from 1983. He worked as a music critic for The Village Voice in New York City. He is known for works such as An Hour for Piano, The Four-Note Opera, Riemann Opera, and Bonhoeffer Oratorio.

Life and career

Tom Johnson was born in Greeley, Colorado, on November 18, 1939, where he received a religious education at a Methodist church, which influenced his work. He received two degrees from Yale, a B.A. (1961) and the M.Mus. (1967), after which he studied privately with Morton Feldman in New York City. He was influenced also by John Cage whom he met. From 1971 to 1983, Johnson he was a music critic for The Village Voice, 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. Through his work, he met composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, among others. 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). In his humorous opera The Four-Note Opera, he uses only four notes. The singers play themselves, announcing what they and others do. 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 […]". Johnson considered 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 in 1972. His minimalism is of a formalist type, depending mostly on logical sequences, as in the 21 Rational Melodies (1982), where he explored procedures such as accumulation, counting, and isorhythm.

After 15 years in New York, he moved to Paris in 1983 where he lived with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer. He composed the Riemannoper (Riemann Opera), deriving a humorous libretto from Hugo Riemann's music dictionary. It was premiered in Bremen, and was staged more than 20 times afterwards.

He developed more complex techniques using mathematical notions. This began with the collection of Music for 88 (1988), where he applied ideas of Eratosthenes, Euler, Mersenne, and Blaise Pascal. Later he collaborated with living mathematicians, particularly Jean-Paul Allouche, Emmanuel Amiot, Jeff Dinitz, 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 introduced text and visual images to produce a theatrical atmosphere close to performance art. The librettos for his operas, which he almost always wrote himself, describe what takes place in the music in an objective manner, somewhat reminiscent of Pirandello. 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, sermons and texts denouncing Nazism. He said about it: "I had a mission, a testimony to convey, a message, which my music doesn’t generally have".

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 in the 17th century.

After 2000, the work of Johnson was less concerned with theatricality and turned more toward musical form and mathematics. From about 2004 to 2010 he worked with what he called "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).

Johnson died on December 31, 2024, at the age of 85.

Publications

• The Voice of New Music. New York City 1972–1982, a collection of articles originally publishes in the Village Voice, Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven 1989, ISBN 90-71638-09-X.
• Self-Similar Melodies. Editions 75, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-907200-01-1
• Finding Music. Writings/Schriften 1961–2018 (EN/DE), Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 2019, ISBN 978-3-9813319-5-0
• Other Harmony beyond tonal and atonal. Editions 75, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-907200-02-8

External links

• Tom Johnson discography at Discogs
• Tom Johnson on YouTube
• Catalogue kalvos.org
• Girard, Bernhard: Conversations avec Tom Johnson (book of interviews) musicae.fr
• Johnson, Tom: The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–1982 – A Collection of Articles Originally Published by the Village Voice 1989
• Tom Johnson Editions 75, 2025
• Tom Johnson: Some Observations on Tiling Problems IRCAM
• An Hour for Piano streamed online produced by Irritable Hedgehog Music
• 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?"
• Greg Sandow: NewMusicBox.org: View From The East: An Old Friend newmusicbox.org 2003