Tom Johnson (composer)

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Tom Johnson (born November 18, 1939 in Greeley (Colorado) ) is an American composer and music critic and has lived in Paris since 1983 .

Career

Johnson studied at Yale College in New Haven (Connecticut) with Elliott Carter (degrees in 1961 and 1967) and privately with Morton Feldman (1965/66). He became known as a composer of works with an extremely limited sound supply or musical material, e.g. B. the approximately one-hour Four note opera (1972), which uses and plays through no more than four pitches in all possible sequences. These are constructed with the help of mathematical processes and models, which became the main compositional principle of Johnson's musical work.

Between 1972 and 1982 Johnson wrote weekly music reviews for the New York magazine Village Voice , especially about performances of the then emerging minimal music and thus became an authentic main witness of the development of this musical style. These reviews were later published as a book. More books followed.

style

Stylistically, Tom Johnson can be assigned to minimal music , but his individual characteristics of this direction make his music hardly comparable in this context. Johnson likes to use mathematical formulas, theorems , number pyramids or number games , which he consistently transfers melodically or rhythmically to the music - especially to the piano . But his only string quartet Formula also consists of eight movements, each of which is based on a mathematical formula. These logical-rational composition principles have been contrasted with graphic scores in the form of drawings ( Symmetries for piano four hands), which can be interpreted relatively freely , since the 1980s .

Works

One of the first compositions with which Johnson consistently treads this path is the work Nine Bell (1979). His most commercially successful work is likely to be the Riemann Opera (1988), in which various articles from Hugo Riemann's music dictionary were set to music. So there is a recitative to the lexicon text recitative and an aria to the lexicon text aria etc .; the work experienced numerous productions, especially at European theaters. One of his main works is the full-length Bonhoeffer Oratorio (1988–92).

Publications

  • The Voice of New Music. New York City 1972-1982; a collection of articles originally published in the "Village Voice" . Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven 1989, ISBN 90-71638-09-X . (is available for free download )
  • 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

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Johnson, Tom
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer and music critic
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Greeley (Colorado)