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LCD 1081CD
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2000 release. Originally released on Lovely Music in 1979. Tom Johnson's trance music piece made up of repeating 4/4 cells in which an absolutely steady eighth-note motion predominates. Often several cells are going on simultaneously, and one cell frequently mutates into another through the addition or subtraction of a note or two. One has to step back far enough to get a perspective on the large-scale shifts in density and tonality before the impact of An Hour For Piano can be felt. Frederic Rzewski plays very percussively throughout, giving the piece an intense forward motion. CD booklet includes Tom Johnson's, "Program Notes to be read while hearing An Hour for Piano", and an essay by Kenneth Goldsmith, "An Hour of Tom Johnson".
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XI 106CD
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1992 release. Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. They led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid. These sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those he had used before. Music for 88 contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
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XI 123CD
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1999 release. Tom Johnson composed The Chord Catalogue in 1986 and has performed it numerous times around the world since then. This is the first recording. The score consists of a set of verbal instructions and is included in the CD booklet. "Extreme and, one would think, extremely simple. A lesser man would have arranged those 8178 chords in some symphonically meaningful, or else quasi-random order. But Johnson proceeded methodically up the chromatic scale from two notes at a time, three, four, and so on to 13. By the time we reach ten note chords, the information overload was such that the differences were hardly perceptible, a situation reminiscent of serial music. Far from being heavy handed minimalism, The Chord Catalogue was a pointed lesson in music history and the relativity of perception" --Kyle Gann, The Village Voice. "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. 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." --Tom Johnson
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NW 80705CD
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Dedalus: Didier Aschour, guitar; Amélie Berson, flute; Eric Chalan, bass; Denis Chouillet, piano; Thierry Madiot, trombone; Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, saxophone; Silvia Tarozzi, violin; Fabrice Villard, clarinet; Deborah Walker, violoncello.
'I am particularly pleased, because the result is so different from the solo flute recording of Eberhard Blum and the solo clarinet recording of Roger Heaton. It is not just another interpretation, but a case where interpreters have added so much insight to the music that the music itself has grown. When I was composing this music around 1982, I really thought I was simply writing melodies, but now these little pieces, though remaining melodies, have become something much more, something I would never have imagined. They have become what you hear on this CD.' -- Tom Johnson
"Tom Johnson (b. 1939) belongs to a generation of American composers who founded musical minimalism. We know that this term was first applied to the visual arts, notably to Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and particularly Sol LeWitt, whom Johnson recognizes as an influence. However, it wasn't the repetition in itself that interested him, but rather the idea of music as a process. Steve Reich applied this idea brilliantly in his phase pieces. But after 1975, while the same Reich distanced himself from the radicalism of his first works, and younger American composers came out with music that was lusher, more expressive, even sentimental, Johnson insisted on the unrelenting rigor of formalized processes. The Rational Melodies, composed in 1982, may be regarded as the outcome of this research, first of all by their sheer quantity, but also by the fact that they summarize brilliantly and clearly procedures from the past, present, and future, which together characterize his work: combinations of cycles of different lengths (I, IV, XI, XVII, XVIII), permutations (VII, X), the paper-folding or 'dragon' formula (II, XIX), other automata (XVI, XX), or self-similar structures (XIV, XV)."
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POGUS 21033
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Daniel Kientzy, saxophones; Meta Duo; Tom Johnson, narrator. In 'Kientzy Loops', the accompanying loop is a mix of six alto saxophones played in continuous blowing, while the principal lines are played on alto saxophone, except for the third section, played on baritone. The present multi-track saxophone version is probably as rich and energetic as any of the large ensemble versions. The melody is played by three overdubbed sopranino saxophones in unison, the bass line is played by three baritones, and the drone is played by three altos. In each of the four Infinite Melodies the music follows a logical sequence requiring each subsequent phrase to become longer and longer, reaching out toward infinity. Since the four melodies are independent pieces, it is not necessary that they be played in the written sequence. In this case the interpreter ordered his four interpretations according to their contrast and durations, so that the CD ends with 'Infinite Melody No. 1'. Here the music contains longer and longer silences, finally ending with a silence so long that it seems to dissolve into infinite silence as the CD player stops turning."
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ANTS 005CD
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"File under: minimalism, conceptual sound art, organ music. A music whose talking about, 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 founding part of it, and it's not possible to give it up. It's the tentative, 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, that he strictly associate to a strong conceptual component. 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, Kentucky, spring 2001. Performed by: Wesley Roberts, organ.
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