Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Tom Johnson's Symmetrical Universe

Tom Johnson: Symmetries

Samuel Vriezen and Dante Oei, piano

Karnatic Lab Records KLR 010

Tom Johnson, born in the United States in 1939 but long resident in France, has done a bit of everything. Aside from his long tenure as critic for the Village Voice (a book of his collected columns is available, for free, on his website), he has spent a creative career exploring the boundaries of arbitrary musical limitation in all of its various guises. Some of the products of this exploration are relatively well known: Failing: a very difficult piece for string bass, in which a solo bassist must play a very difficult piece for string bass while delivering a text about how very difficult that piece for string bass is, especially when you must play it while delivering a text; and the Four-Note Opera, which likewise is exactly what it sounds like.

One persistent stream in Johnson’s large oeuvre is a world of pieces constructed according to maximally rational principles. There are self-similar melodies, rational melodies, tilings, and catalogues, all thoroughly and proudly artificial constructs whose musical results emerge unbidden and unexpected and thus somehow miraculous. And then there are those pieces that exist within other sorts of strictures, less mathematical, less precisely structural, but just as unintuitive, just as anti-musical.

The Symmetries on this CD, for example, are a series of 49 tiny pieces, most lasting under a minute and none much over, each of which is a “transcription” of a different drawing made with a music typewriter and consisting entirely of musical symbols – notes of various “durations”, ties, slurs, beams, trills, tremolos, and so forth. The drawings, which are reprinted in the booklet, are all of course symmetrical: some only around a central vertical axis, others also rotationally or horizontally. There are diamonds, pyramids, columns, curves, and constellations. None was originally created with any sort of “musical” idea in mind.

And yet what we have here is a resolutely literal sonic representation of these non-musical creations for piano four hands. (Only the pitches are under any subjective control – the pitch universe of each piece is internally consistent and generally very simple, using a minimum of intervallic diversity, but there is no consistent “mapping.”) The result is a delightful tour in miniature of what surprises await a musical explorer like Johnson, guided only by an acute sense of possibility, who resolves to circumvent any intuitive or traditional definitions of what constitutes “musical” form. For some of the little forms here are startling in both their delightfulness and their unexpectedness. A quick florid gesture gives way to a thirty-second-long trill, only to be repeated verbatim – a completed form. Registers expand and contract, once only or maybe twice – more completed forms. These forty-nine little forms are all completed, partly by their universally shared symmetry about the center of their respective timespans, partly by a sense of quirky inevitability, and partly by fiat.

In Symmetries, in other words, Johnson does for form and gesture what Alvin Lucier has made a career of doing for sound: taking it out of context, alienating it, and then discovering what possibilities dwell where you least expect to find them. The performers, Sequenza21 irregular Samuel Vriezen and frequent collaborator Dante Oei, have a choice here. They can play it as straight as possible, perhaps, attempting to highlight the essentially “objective” (a code word for non-“musical”) process behind these little pieces; or they can take what they are given and try to make sense of it, to make music of it. Wisely, Vriezen and Oei do neither a priori. On the one hand, where music lurks, there they find music. In one piece, for example, a keyboard-spanning G minor chord is transformed through stepwise motion of one voice at a time through a series of differently voiced seventh chords to B-flat major and then, symmetrically, back again; a classical gesture, a Schubertian gesture almost, that the duo pianists treat with the understated lyricism it deserves. Mostly, though, these tiny worlds have something aggressively alien about them – the long trill framed by ornamental bookends mentioned above is a prime example – and where there are edges, Vriezen and Oei do not attempt to smooth them.

Tom Johnson’s “objective” pieces can be beguiling, fascinating, and at the same time virtually impossible to listen to – his Chord Catalogue, an hour-long piece that simply presents all eight thousand-plus possible chords between middle C and the C an octave above in ascending order by number of notes, is a case in point. Symmetries, by contrast, serves as an ideal starting point for exploration of the “rationalist” in Tom Johnson: the charm jostling fiercely with aggressive purity on display here is easily consumed in forty-nine bites, a series of pithy introductions to a delightful universe. This is a wonderful record, in the literal sense.

posted by Evan Johnson 7/21/2006