4/23/20

View fullsize

Tom Johnson (1939- )

Today’s piece is one which I stumbled across by chance. Having no other knowledge of works by the American composer Tom Johnson, it was certainly lucky to have found a random piece of which is incredibly unique and captivating. In fact, even having been exposed to today’s piece about couple of years ago, I knew (up until writing this post) a laughably small amount of information about Tom Johnson. This particular piece of Johnson’s, Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass (written in 1975), seemed to take the internet by storm following a video posted by an undergraduate performance major in the Juilliard School (which is the video I will be linking below).

Failing is a piece which may fall under the umbrella of “performance art,” or music which is written with more emphasis on theatrical, visual, or other non-musical elements. While many other pieces of Johnson are much further down this vein of music, this piece still resembles that style in how it requires the bassist to speak tangentially to the music. So while this may normally be the section of the post in which I discuss the concept or outline of the piece, it is actually better that I hold off on that description for this particular piece - as you will find out from listening to it, the piece explains itself the more it goes on. Even today, this piece remains the only work which I know of that actually dissects itself.

Though I will hold out on analyzing the musical elements of this particular piece, I would still like to comment on the genius of the piece. First of all, one can’t help but make note of how much the piece is driven by comedy and irony. By comedy, I do not mean the sort of humor you would hear from a stand up comedian, nor the type of humor which you might hear in a symphony by Franz Joseph Haydn (although a stretch might be to place it somewhere between the two) - instead, I mean comedy in the sense that the parallel of the perception of the music with the narration of the music is nothing short of “funny.” In fact, the odd and disjunctive interjections of atonal material only add to the quirky humor that defines the piece. While the piece is comedic, I also do not want to draw attention away from the genius writing for the narration. In the beginning, the narration primarily describes what is literally happening in the piece, but as it continues, it drifts more towards describing the audience’s perception and the piece’s own logic. Part of the fun for the listener is making sense of whether or not the narration is speaking as the voice of the performer or as the ‘voice of the music itself.’ To me, it almost seems as if the narration is trying to get into the mind of the listener to create humor at the expense of the performer.

Ironically, Failing is a piece which has been one of the hardest for me to describe. As I mentioned, there really isn’t much that I would need to say before one sits down to listen to the piece. Explaining too much it would perhaps even ruin the effect before you listen to it. In one set of concluding thoughts, however, I would like to reiterate the point of just how different this piece is to the vast history of classical music. While Failing in no way resembles Become Ocean, I find that both are a completely unique work in a field which is often so defined by genre or history. Perhaps it serves as a testament to just how different contemporary music can be and how much new and fresh classical music is yet to be written. Either way, hopefully this piece will serve as another great example of contemporary music that may be strange but certainly is approachable and rooted in the history of art music. Just like my post on Luciano Berio’s Rendering from earlier in the month, I would highly suggest watching/listening to this piece without the score first - knowing what the performer will say next may ruin part of the effect. However, if you do decide to check out the score (which is quite entertaining in its own way), a link to that video can be found here.