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Music for 88
Tom Johnson Piano and Voice
Recorded at Studio de la Grand Armee, Paris, on May 7, 1990 and December 23, 1991.
Piano and Voice: Tom Johnson
Artistic Advisor: Kaye Mortley
Sound Engineers: Cyril Noton and Cedric Perverie
Special thanks to: Thomas Buckner, Experimental Intermedia
Music for 88 is published by Editions 75 (SACEM), 75, rue de la Roquette, 75011 Paris. The sub-publisher for North America is the Two-Eighteen Press (BMI), PO Box 218, Village Station, New York, NY 10014. The complete score for Music for 88, which also includes Squares, Triangles, and Eratosthenes' Sieve, is available from both addresses.
simplicity and clarity have always been among my chief concerns as a composer. This is probably largely a reaction to the contemporary music I heard as a student in the 60's, which seemed to me to be mostly concerned with complexity and obfuscation. The search for clear, simple, elegant statements led me to a number of different kinds of reductive or minimalistic music, many of which involved counting and numbers, and went even to the point of Counting Languages, which became pure spoken number, with hardly any music left at all.
By 1987, it became obvious that I would understand a little better what I was doing if I knew some mathematics beyond what I had learned in high school algebra. So I began reading some math books, particularly old classics of number theory by Pascal, Fermat, Euclid, and others, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those I had used before. I wanted to use them, and I wanted them to be clear, and sometimes the only way to be clear is to explain things, and sometimes the explanation is so important that it needs to become part of the music, and that is more or less what happened with the Music for 88.
The result is blatantly didactic, and this is fine as far as I am concerned. The joy
of learning can be as great as the joy of any artistic experience, and if listeners
here learn something about abundant numbers or Mersenne numbers or tiling
patterns, as well as simply hearing some music, that seems fine to me, too.
—Tom Johnson
Tom Johnson loves counting, systematic calculation, and predictability. He is the master of a logical music, the essence of which involves the complete revealing of its premises. Through the strategy of tautological self-reference, and by avoiding any sort of mystery, its apparent dry seriousness, all by itself, can turn into clarifying wit and rather amazing insight.
—Matthias Osterwold, Berlin, 1988
Tom Johnson likes to push austerity to the ultimate, and with his bare materials, he enjoys demonstrating that a new complexity arises there where we thought we had reached the ultimate simplicity.
—Gerard Conde, Paris, 1985
Through various stages of his compositional development, Johnson's main concern has been music men proceeds in predictable ways, and which thus completely avoids the mysterious or the secret. This renunciation, even more radical in recent years, with the use of strict rational systems, does not, however, threaten the artistic quality of the work. There is always a tension between the transparent logic of the structure of the piece and the material that generates it.
—Veniero Rizzardi, Padua, 1984
Tom Johnson, born in Colorado in 1939, received B,A. and M.Mus. degrees from Yale University and also studied composition privately with Morion Feldman. He is perhaps best known for his operas, particularly The Four Note Opera (1972), which has been produced over sixty times in ten different languages, and Riemannoper (1988). Non-operatic works that have received particular attention over the years include his solo performance Nine Bells, Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass, and theatrical pieces such as Self-Portrait and the f Scene for Piano and Tape. A number of works specifically for radio have • been produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company, the French Radio, and WDR in Cologne. He recently completed the two largest works he has ever produced, the Bonhoeffer Oratorio, with texts by the theologian Dietrich Bonoeffer, and Una Opera Italiana, an Italian opera.
From 1972 to 1982, Johnson also worked regularly as a music critic for the Village Voice, and a large collection of these articles, which form a unique chronicle of the evolution of minimal music in New York during this period, was published in 1989 by Apollohuis in Eindhoven, Holland, under the title, The Voice of New Music.
Johnson has lived in Paris since 1983.
14 Arts
Music/Maths
from the spheres
GETTING THE SUMS RIGHT
Tom Johnson, ICA
Robert Maycock
JUST AFTER 8pm on Sunday evening, muffled crash emerged from behind tl curtain where the pianist was due I enter. It must have been Pythagoras' ghost. Whatever Tom Johnson's tot; intellectual history may be, the ancient Greek mathematician can claim a share i the sources. His performance at the 1C was not so much a recital as an illustrate lecture, scrawling formulae on the pages of a flip-chart between pieces and talking amiably about the arithmetic at the cent] of his compositions.
You were immediately plunged into world of music that seems to sophisticates like number-fetishism, but is on! the latest appearance of a view as old European civilization. For Pythagoras an his followers, number was reality. The secrets of music were the ratios and pre portions that gave you harmony; therefore music, too, was reality. Something similar surfaced in the idea of the "music c the spheres" that fascinated cosmotologists in the Renaissance.
Johnson, a soft-spoken American in his fifties, reverts to the bare minimum of musical elaboration, and makes no metaphysical claims: "I preferred my own music" he wrote in the program for Adrian Jack's "New MusICA" series, "to be transparent and self-evident and cool and explainable and inexpressive and easy to understand." Some of the extracts he played from Music for 88 just used all 88 notes of the keyboard once each. Others were meant to be demonstrations of basic numerical properties, such as what happens when you divide a squared number by three. Method: in the right hand play, say, a four-note phrase four times. In the left, at the same pulse, keep repeating a three-note phrase, and see how the hands complete the process at the same time. Then do it again with five phrases of five notes, and so on.
As the sums get more complicated there is the frisson of seeing whether human frailty will get the upper hand - it did, three of four times - but that is all. The listener's frailty then starts to take over. By the time Johnson has explained his chordal version of Pascal's Triangle, and you realize it is going to culminate in a sequence of 512 closely related chords each made out of ten notes, that old glazed feeling has crept up.
There is, in fact, a basic difference from the Greeks' music. While the ancient theories grew from the physical realities of a sounding object — halving the length of a string raises the pitch an octave, and so forth - Johnson's number games are abstract. What he does is transfer the patterns to the keyboard. The interest lies in the fact that, elementary as they are, they are still pleasing patterns. Johnson is not taking a mathematician's attitude to music, but a musician's attitude to arithmetic.
Once you've worked out the philosophy, there isn't too much else to listen for. But as with Cage, one good reason for coming back another time is to remind yourself of the point of view. What he does is to remind you how much "normal" music is made by projecting emotional associations on to it. Here, for once, is not the cry of the human heart, but the design of what's out there. And the mystery, the reason why this is art and not science, is that there is delight in the design itself. Make of it what you will, but it will be around for a few billion years yet.
From the London Independent, April 24, 1992
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