As composer, Brian Johnson (a.k.a. the Human Being) makes music for dance, theater, percussion and voice. As percussionist, he has premiered works by leading figures of the American experimental music tradition. He has worked as ensemble musician with the New York Shakespeare Festival, Loren Mazzacene, William Hooker and Joesph Celli. An accomplished soloist, he is a member of the International Percussive Arts Society.
Born in Colorado, Johnson received his B.A. and M.M. degrees from Yale and also studied with Morton Feldman. He is perhaps best known for The Four Note Opera, which was premiered in New York City in 1972 and which has since been produced over 50 times in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Catalan. He has always considered himself a minimalist with his composing focused on logical progressions and highly predictable structures. In the 1970s, Johnson's weekly columns in the Village Voice covered the emergence and development of minimal music in New York City. Though traveling frequently, his residence since 1983 has been in Paris. "The world is easier to understand," he says, "when viewed from about halfway between Moscow and Washington." He recently completed the two largest works he has ever produced, the Bonhoeffer Oratorio, with texts of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Una Opera Italiana, an Italian opera.
A music concerned for, as the author writes in the disc notes, "… the importance of silence in music…". This work is conceived not "for organ" but, really, for "organ and silence", as the silence is a fundamental part of it, and it’s not possible to give it up. It’s an attempt, as the author explain " to permit as much silence as possible, without allowing the music to actually stop".
Tom Johnson is one of the masters of minimalism, but he combines this with rigorous logic. His work, free from false glitters, defines, better that any other one, the sense of a research the goes beyond the strict genre definitions, and become poetic application of original ideas.
Recorded in Nerinx, in Kentucky, spring 2001 - Wesley Roberts, organ.
Edition of 1000 copies. All transparent jewel case. 8 pages booklet with author's notes and bios, in Italian and English
Prose instructions for short piano pieces to be played in private. A 1976 edition of the 218 Press.
Excerpts from the liner notes by Tom Johnson:
I like to think of The Chord Catalogue as a sort of natural phenomenon--something which has always been present in the ordinary musical scale, and which I simply observed, rather than invented. It is not so much a composition as simply a list. I have often tried to explain that my music is a reaction against the romantic and expressionistic musical past, and that I am seeking something more objective, something that doesn't express my emotions, something that doesn't try to manipulate the emotions of the listener either, something outside myself.
Nine pieces for the 88 keys of the piano, first performed on French radio in 1988, and mostly having to do with the number 88. Pascal's Triangle, The Multiplication Table and Eratosthenes' Sieve are a few of the titles. An 80 page book with sewn binding and instructions in French and German, as well as in English.
Kientzy plays Johnson
Daniel Kientzy, saxophones; Meta Duo; Tom Johnson, narrator
It is a great pleasure for Pogus to present this recording of Daniel Kientzy playing the works of Tom Johnson.
Includes music for the dances of Mary Luft's Power Living, compositions made with voice, percussion, toy and found instruments, and Dreams on the Turtle Earth, a dreaming journey for organ drone, percussion instruments and voice.
A collection of 21 systematic melodies playable on all melodic instruments.
That means "200 Years" in English, and the work is a 30-minute opera for soprano, baritone, and an ensemble of cellos, which was written for the French bicentennial and was premiered at the Festival d'Avignon in 1989. A limited edition of 200 numbered copies.
Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
This collection of 21 melodies is a kind of summary of the logical and mathematical techniques used by the composer. While all melodic instruments can play this music, this recording features the interpretive talents of German flutist Eberhard Blum
An earlier and smaller version of the Symmetries for piano four-hands published in 1990. The 1981 version includes only the compositional drawings, without the specific instructions as to how to play them.