Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde song in downtown New York right through the Nineteen Seventies, and whose personal compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical readability, died on Tuesday at his house in Paris. He used to be 85.
His spouse and solely speedy survivor, the efficiency artist Esther Ferrer, stated the reason used to be a stroke following long-term emphysema.
Mr. Johnson used to be a tender New York composer short of source of revenue in 1971 when he spotted that the thrilling performances he heard downtown weren’t being coated by way of native information shops. He introduced to write down concerning the recent song scene for The Voice, and he quickly started a weekly column.
It used to be an opportune second: Artwork galleries, lofts and venues just like the Kitchen have been presenting live shows by way of younger experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson changed into the rising scene’s leader chronicler.
“No person discovered on the time that probably the most important genres of significant song of the century used to be growing, a style that used to be to transform referred to as American minimalism, and which might to find imitators in all places the arena,” he wrote in 1983, in his ultimate Voice column.
He charted the upward thrust of musical minimalism, together with the transformation of the native composer Phil Glass to a world phenomenon, however he additionally documented radical paintings by way of lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wada, who sang via huge plumbing pipes; Jim Burton, who amplified bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncanny drones on a synthesizer.
“I discovered some fascinating issues about gongs on Might 30 at a Centre Side road loft live performance,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 display by way of the younger composer Rhys Chatham. “That gongs have many alternative pitches, maximum of which don’t make a lot sense in the case of the overtone sequence; that other tones stand out, relying on how the gong is struck; that once a gong makes a crescendo, a lovely whoosh of top sound streams into the room; that loud gongs vibrate the ground in a different approach and put an abnormal rate within the air; that being attentive to gongs, performed on my own for over an hour, is an bizarre enjoy.”
By means of describing such outré happenings in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson supplied a countrywide readership with get admission to to performances that could be attended by way of just a dozen listeners, and most likely by no means heard once more. He noticed himself as a player inside the scene, and he supplied such beneficiant protection that he changed into recognized amongst composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, gathered within the 1989 e-book “The Voice of New Music,” be offering a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical generation; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang within the refrain for a practice session of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera “Einstein at the Seashore.”
However Mr. Johnson used to be additionally unafraid to critique live shows that he idea didn’t paintings conceptually, or notice when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal dangers. He as soon as trustworthy 1000 phrases to reviewing “probably the most spectacular performances I ever heard”: the warbling of a mockingbird on Lengthy Island.
He used to be a number of the first writers to start the usage of the time period “minimum” to explain a lot of the repetitive song he heard, and he implemented the phrase to his personal compositions, such because the hypnotic 1971 paintings “An Hour for Piano.” “I’ve all the time been very happy with it, as a result of that’s the one phrase that truly describes what I’m doing,” he stated in a 2014 interview. “I all the time labored with lowered fabrics and attempted to do easy song.”
In Mr. Johnson’s dryly postmodern “4 Observe Opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — on solely the notes A, B, D and E. The primary efficiency, in 1972, had an target audience of about 10 other folks; the opera has since won greater than 100 productions. For “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked amongst a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for almost an hour, chiming them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and bodily exertion.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, he immersed himself in Euclid’s quantity theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, keen to seek out new musical constructions. His compositions of this era come with “Rational Melodies,” a chain of entrancing miniatures constructed from easy, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that may be present in a unmarried octave.
Regardless that undergirded by way of his mathematical workouts, Mr. Johnson’s song is visceral and intelligible — and, frequently, intentionally predictable — quite than abstruse. “There’s something specifically pleasurable about initiatives the place the common sense (the song) turns out to get up naturally from some discovery out of doors of myself, and the place the whole lot comes in conjunction with no less than tampering (of composing),” he as soon as wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson used to be born on Nov. 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colo., a small farming neighborhood. His folks, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, have been lecturers.
When he used to be about 7, Tom started taking part in the piano intermittently, and he discovered his interest for song at age 13 underneath the tutelage of a neighborhood piano trainer, Rita Hutcherson, who additionally inspired his composing.
Regardless that lots of his friends attended close by universities, Ms. Hutcherson prompt Mr. Johnson to use to Yale, the place he won a bachelor’s level in arts in 1961 and a grasp’s in song in 1967. As an undergraduate, he took a seminar with the distinguished composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the musical academy, however he discovered himself embracing repetition and stasis as an alternative of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to check privately with the experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him to find his inventive voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice however suffering to have his personal paintings carried out, Mr. Johnson decamped to Paris in 1983, the place recent alternatives awaited, as Eu audiences have been newly interested in the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific author, theorizing about his personal song in different books. He were publishing his personal rankings for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, and he maintained an lively internet presence with a video series elucidating his song.
His primary works have incorporated the satirical “Riemannoper,” according to excerpts from a famed German song lexicon, which has won greater than 30 productions; and a extra severe oratorio drawing at the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However a lot of Mr. Johnson’s output remained resolutely summary, together with an orchestral paintings that lays out a chain of 360 chords and a chain of new items that systematically discover more than a few rhythmic mixtures.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan led to divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One in all Mr. Johnson’s compositions has transform canonic within the double-bass neighborhood: “Failing” (1975), a fiendishly tricky and hilarious workout wherein a soloist is advised to bow tough passages whilst studying a long textual content aloud that self-reflexively feedback at the song. “Those items all needed to do with making song as actual lifestyles,” Mr. Johnson stated of the paintings in a 2020 interview. “I sought after the performer to confront an unknown scenario and handle it in addition to imaginable in a one-time-only context.”
