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NW 80831CD
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"Tom Johnson (b. 1939) is a key figure in the contemporary music scene whose voice as a composer is instantly recognizable. A major champion of minimalism in the 1970s as a writer, he remains one of its most important adherents as a composer, although the word 'minimalist' does not cover everything that his music does. The characteristic elements of repetition and sparse material are there, but his extensive use of mathematics and, especially, counting, makes him unique. Johnson relies on more than counting, using algorithms, combinatorics, juggling, and tiling techniques, among other things. Johnson is as radical as Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock, but he is also interested in sounds that can be enjoyed in the moment, and in this sense, he is a true heir of Feldman, who was one of his teachers. Counting to Seven (2014) is a set of short pieces lasting about 80 minutes, of which eighteen pieces are presented here. Although obviously vocal because they are text-based, some of the pieces include percussion. They can be performed by almost any group of at least seven people and are not written for trained singers or actors. It was around 1980 that Johnson developed a series of twelve solos in twelve languages called Counting Languages, under the inspiration of sound poets such as Charlie Morrow and Jerome Rothenberg in the United States and Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, and Bernard Heidsieck in Europe. He then wrote Counting Duets, (also called Counting Music), a set of five counting sequences for two performers speaking in one language. Some years later, after a performance by Vincent Bouchot from the ensemble Dedalus, Johnson 'reworked everything for seven voices. I changed the title to Counting to Seven, added about 30 languages, well-known, little known, living and dead, and put together an 80-minute version, which we began performing in 2014.' Johnson explores the tonalities and rhythms that come from repeating numbers sonorously in different languages. Every piece is different, with 1-7 as the connecting thread, like a set of short stories that forms a novel through a connecting character. The languages Johnson chose include major ones spoken in large swathes of the world -- French, Japanese, Hebrew, German. Some are more national -- Turkish, Hungarian, Gaelic, Georgian. Some are specific to certain places: Muruwari is spoken by Aboriginal people in northern Australia; Tajik is a variety of Persian spoken in Uzbekistan; Maninke is spoken in Guinea, Mali, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast."
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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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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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