Tom Johnson, the minimalist composer and former Village Voice columnist who documented New York Metropolis’s downtown avant-garde music scene, has died, the New York Instances experiences. In line with his spouse, efficiency artist Esther Ferrer, Johnson suffered a stroke following long-term emphysema final Tuesday, December 31, at his dwelling in Paris, France. He was 85.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939 in Greeley, Colorado. The son of two lecturers, Johnson started enjoying piano on the age of seven, and graduated from Yale College with a bachelor’s diploma in arts and a grasp’s in music. In 1967, he moved to New York Metropolis to check beneath composer Morton Feldman; there, he additionally encountered John Cage, who grew to become a recent of Johnson’s and an affect on his work.
In 1971, Johnson started writing about New York’s downtown music scene for the Village Voice, and shortly after obtained picked up as a weekly columnist, the place he coated Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and different members of what would quickly be termed the “American minimalist” faculty. Johnson was one of many first writers to make use of the time period “minimal” in reference to his personal and others’ work. Finally recognized amongst composers as Saint Tom, he had his writings for the Voice compiled within the 1989 e book The Voice of New Music.
As a composer, Johnson was impressed by the work of historic philosophers and mathematicians as a lot as he was different musicians. A lot of his most well-known works—amongst them “An Hour for Piano” (1971), “Failing” (1975), “9 Bells” (1979), and Rational Melodies (1982)—toyed with or instantly commented on the mechanics of composition and efficiency. For instance, 1972’s “The 4 Observe Opera” tasked a quartet with singing arias about arias utilizing solely 4 notes from the chromatic scale. It has since been produced greater than 100 occasions.
Tom Johnson printed his closing Voice column in 1983, the identical yr he moved to Paris. He continued to put in writing, publishing a number of books about his personal work and even creating an academic YouTube collection known as Illustrated Music within the late 2010s. Johnson married Ferrer, his second spouse following a divorce from choreographer Kathy Duncan, in 1986. “In fact, listeners can simply depart the music there within the background and let it wash over them,” Johnson mentioned in a 2020 interview with Excellent Sound Eternally. “It’s extra rewarding if one thinks a little bit about what one is listening to. There are a whole bunch of issues you may take into consideration, surprise about, analyze, in case you actually need to perceive a bit about what you are listening to, and that’s true of any music.”
