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 Times reports. In line with his spouse, efficiency artist Esther Ferrer, Johnson suffered a stroke following long-term emphysema final Tuesday, December 31, at his residence in Paris, France. He was 85.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on November 18, 1939 in Greeley, Colorado. The son of two academics, 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 review below 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 lined 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. Ultimately identified amongst composers as Saint Tom, he had his writings for the Voice compiled within the 1989 guide The Voice of New Music.
As a composer, Johnson was impressed by the work of historical philosophers and mathematicians as a lot as he was different musicians. Lots of his most well-known works—amongst them “An Hour for Piano” (1971), “Failing” (1975), “Nine Bells” (1979), and Rational Melodies (1982)—toyed with or instantly commented on the mechanics of composition and efficiency. For instance, 1972’s “The Four Note 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 12 months he moved to Paris. He continued to jot down, 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 go away the music there within the background and let it wash over them,” Johnson mentioned in a 2020 interview with Good Sound Without end. “It’s extra rewarding if one thinks just a little about what one is listening to. There are a whole lot of issues you may take into consideration, surprise about, analyze, for those who actually wish to perceive a bit about what you are listening to, and that’s true of any music.”
