![[Tom Johnson]](johnson.gif)
Tom Johnson
Music for 88
XI (CD )
Truly odd, Music for 88 is a very serious attempt at putting mathematics
into music -- and although this isn't a novel concept, Tom Johnson takes it
to new extremes. Moving beyond merely stating the music's dependence on
equations, Johnson lectures the listener between segments and even calls
out numbers while he's playing. And what makes this so charming is that
none of it is done as an attempt at performance art, but instead is done
as a sincere effort to educate the listener. "Pascal's Triangle," for
example, consists of taking two intervals and then playing all the
chords that can be derived from those intervals. Moving from three-note
chords (with 4 possible combinations) until he reaches ten-note chords
(with 512 possible combinations), this is an exercise that begins as a
math lesson and ends with the listener lost in dense harmonic
sonorities. --es