Tom Johnson, the minimalist composer and former Village Voice columnist who documented New York City’s downtown avant-garde music scene, has died, the New York Times reports. According to his wife, performance artist Esther Ferrer, Johnson suffered a stroke following long-term emphysema last Tuesday, December 31, at his home in Paris, France. He was 85.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939 in Greeley, Colorado. The son of two teachers, Johnson began playing piano at the age of seven, and graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in arts and a master’s in music. In 1967, he moved to New York City to study under composer Morton Feldman; there, he also encountered John Cage, who became a contemporary of Johnson’s and an influence on his work.
In 1971, Johnson began writing about New York’s downtown music scene for the Village Voice, and soon after got picked up as a weekly columnist, where he covered Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and other members of what would soon be termed the “American minimalist” school. Johnson was one of the first writers to use the term “minimal” in reference to his own and others’ work. Eventually known among composers as Saint Tom, he had his writings for the Voice compiled in the 1989 book The Voice of New Music.
As a composer, Johnson was inspired by the work of ancient philosophers and mathematicians as much as he was other musicians. Many of his most famous works—among them “An Hour for Piano” (1971), “Failing” (1975), “Nine Bells” (1979), and Rational Melodies (1982)—toyed with or directly commented on the mechanics of composition and performance. For example, 1972’s “The Four Note Opera” tasked a quartet with singing arias about arias using only four notes from the chromatic scale. It has since been produced more than 100 times.
Tom Johnson published his final Voice column in 1983, the same year he moved to Paris. He continued to write, publishing several books about his own work and even creating an educational YouTube series called Illustrated Music in the late 2010s. Johnson married Ferrer, his second wife following a divorce from choreographer Kathy Duncan, in 1986. “Of course, listeners can just leave the music there in the background and let it wash over them,” Johnson said in a 2020 interview with Perfect Sound Forever. “It is more rewarding if one thinks a little about what one is hearing. There are hundreds of things you can think about, wonder about, analyze, if you really want to understand a bit about what you’re hearing, and that is true of any music.”
Source : Pitchfork
