“That which is made with a minimum of means”

January 28, 2021 5:48 PM

Tom Johnson - The Voice of New Music - New York City 1972–1982
A collection of composer Tom Johnson's columns for Village Voice covering the development of NYC minimalism from the inside.

A few highlights:
The premiere of Steve Reich's Drumming in 1971.
Rehearsing ‘Einstein on the Beach’: Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, 1976
Laurie Anderson at the Holly Solomon Gallery, 1977
Pauline Oliveros Meditates, 1977

posted by thatwhichfalls (7 comments total)

Oh cool.

Oh very very cool.

This is so much of my interests! Can't wait to dig in, thank you SO much!
posted by hippybear at 6:41 PM on January 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Oh, this looks FASCINATING. I've started reading the Pauline Oliveros one and the description of the accordion (and how his attention is shifting) is so interesting.

(Also it looks like there's a stray almost-link in the middle of the piece, which would lead to http://tvonm.editions75.com/articles/1977/rhys-chathams-music-is-hard-to-hear.html if it were an actual link, and now I'm curious how it got there and whether it means anything.)

Oh wow - also this, from the Digital Edition page:

With this online digital edition, I am officially donating all these articles to the public domain, although a version in PDF format has been available since 2004. I have the right to do this, because the Village Voice, ever since its beginnings in the 1950s, has been truly a writer’s newspaper, giving 100% of the control and royalties of its articles to the people who wrote them. The Voice was, and perhaps still is, the only large commercial newspaper anywhere where this is the case, and of course, this is one of the things that has made this weekly newspaper a truly important “voice” in our world.

That page alone is worth the FPP to me - but this is a splendid trove, and I am really looking forward to reading through it. Thank you so much for posting it, thatwhichfalls!
posted by kristi at 7:09 PM on January 28, 2021

Jesus fucking christ I thought he had died.

Tom was really generous with me when I had a few questions about a book he had written decades ago. Basically, there were a couple of sentences with pronouns that referred to multiple things and made it impossible for me to dissect the process he was describing for crafting melodies. I e-mailed him and he basically had to reteach himself the technique to explain it to me.

He has a great* youtube channel where he demonstrates the processes behind his music.

*It's great because it's informative and he never requests that I smash any like buttons.
posted by lownote at 8:06 PM on January 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

side note: Steve Reich: Original 1971 live recording [1h21m]
posted by hippybear at 9:21 PM on January 28, 2021

OMG I am so sorry, it seems Part 4 of that Steve Reich Youtube video has been polluted by.... banjos? It's not the original part 4, but it is very cleverly mocked in to the original track so I give them credit for that.
posted by hippybear at 10:58 PM on January 28, 2021

Awesome! I have been lucky enough to experience both Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson several times in concert (and I have the signed Nerve Bible to prove it, too!), but reading about the early days is interesting.
(This may have been the first text on seventies Glass I have read that did not include the anecdotes of him working as a taxi driver or kitchen appliance installer).
posted by bouvin at 1:24 AM on January 29, 2021

This is terrific. Thank you. Does anyone know about the 24 singles that Laurie Anderson put on the jukebox at the Holly Solomon Gallery?

On this page, there are seven singles from 1977 and earlier, including the referenced "New York Social Life," so, we can reasonably assume that these were among the songs on the jukebox, but I'm very curious as to what the other 17 might've been, never mind the fact that they were numbered as high as 143.
posted by the sobsister at 9:43 AM on January 29, 2021