Tom Johnson (composer)
Encyclopedia
Tom Johnson is an American minimalist composer, a former student of Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...

.Allmusic biography

Career

His pieces are most often based simply on mathematical and logical processes, such as tiling
Tessellation
A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a pattern of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. One may also speak of tessellations of parts of the plane or of other surfaces. Generalizations to higher dimensions are also possible. Tessellations frequently appeared in the art...

, which he attempts to make as clear as possible. His works include: The Four Note Opera, An Hour for Piano
An Hour for Piano (Tom Johnson)
Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano was written in 1971. The piece began as a series of short, improvisatory sketches in 1967 when Johnson was accompanying a modern dance class at New York University. Johnson gradually expanded these sketches and added transitions between them, writing a piece that...

, Rational Melodies, the Bonhoeffer Oratorio,Organ and Silence, Riemannoper, and Galileo

Johnson received the French "Victoires de la Musique" prize for contemporary composition (the French equivalent of the "Grammies") in 2001 for "Kientzy Loops".

He lived 15 years in New York, but in 1983 settled in Paris, where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer
Esther Ferrer
Esther Ferrer is a Spanish interdisciplinary artist and performance art teacher. She is regarded as one of the major Spanish artists of her generation...

.

Nine Bells

Nine Bells (1983, India Navigation
India Navigation
India Navigation was an American independent record label that was active from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Founded by corporate lawyer Bob Cummins, the label specialized in jazz music, particularly avant-garde jazz.-Discography:...

) is a conceptual album in which Johnson performs on 9 bells, evenly-spaced and hanging from the ceiling.Allmusic entry Greg Sandow
Greg Sandow
Greg Sandow is an American music critic and composer. He is a graduate of Harvard University, with a bachelor's degree in government, and of Yale University, with a master's degree in composition....

 (2003) describes Nine Bells, "in which he walked, at a steady rhythmic pace (and, if I remember correctly, for more than an hour), among nine suspended burglar alarm bells, systematically exploring all the possible paths among them. Which, since he strikes each bell as he passes it, are also all the possible melodies their pitches might make. As in many of Tom's works, theory and practice are identical here... You see and hear the structure of the piece. That's not even remotely abstract; instead, it's pure happiness, as the pealing bells seem to ring with Tom's concentration (visible in his face and body, audible in his steady steps), and his joie de vivre." At the age of 55, Johnson had to stop performing this athletic piece, but Matthias Kaul, Adam Weisman and others have developed their own interpretations of the score, using their own sets of bells. Similarly, Galileo, another invented instrument consisting of five swinging pendulums, which the composer performed often from 2001 to 2009, is now interpreted by Pierre Berthet.

External links

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