The first piece of Tom Johnson's that I encountered was Failing. It was - and still is - one of the funniest pieces I've ever heard. It's for a solo double bassist who's forced into ever more dangerous conjunctions of playing and talking, the performer giving a blow-by-blow account of what goes on in the piece while playing it. Things eventually get so hot that, forced to move imperceptibly into improvising the text, the player is likely to come unstuck, hence the title. Some years later I turned up an LP copy of Nine Bells, a 50-minute sequence of ringing patterns, executed by walking to-and-fro through rows of suspended bells. There was no escaping the fact that Johnson, an American living in Paris, was that rarest of beings, a true original.
His music is notable for its clarity and logic, and, frequently, its wit. What sets him apart is that he wears his processes on the outside, so to speak, sometimes even in the title. Composition with ascending chromatic scales in twelve tempos, all beginning simultaneously, the piano playing the low notes, the clarinet the middle notes, and the violin the high notes tells it all, as, up to a point, does the Four Note Opera, a work from 1972 which Opera Theatre Company is now adventurously taking on a first Irish tour. The composer describes this as "part absurdist, part minimalist, part satiric and part simple comedy". Five singers (reduced to four by OTC) help put the vanities of the singing profession and the internal tensions of opera performance on display in a piece in which there are, literally, just four notes. Johnson allows for aspects of the staging to be quite free (the words can be modified to suit), but he insists there be no monkeying with the notes.
OTC's production, directed by Gavin Quinn, with designs by Aedin Cosgrove and costumes by Suzanne Cave, has four beds and a dustbin for props. Unlike most operas you will hear with piano (Dearbhla Collins), this one was written that way (additional instruments are out, too) and for 25 years the piece has been leading a very successful, independent life.
OTC's Four Note Opera can be seen in Carigallen (Thursday), Glenamaddy (Friday), Kiltimagh (Sunday 29th), Clifden (Tuesday, December 1st), Kilmallock (Thursday 3rd), Fethard (Friday 4th), Killarney (Sunday 6th), Skibbereen (Tuesday 8th), Tuosist (Wednesday 9th), Listowel (Friday 11th) and Doonbeg (Sunday 13th).
