Tom Johnson - Symmetries | Dante Boon & Samuel Vriezen, piano four hands

Tom Johnson - Symmetries

by Dante Boon & Samuel Vriezen, piano four hands

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sylvain-levier Intriguing and fascinating. The presentation note says it all. Notes and shapes are made to meet, but only a great sensitivity can bring them together in such a revealing way.

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about

Symmetry has generally been devalued in the 20th-century arts. Asymmetry has seemed more free, more open, less predictable, and more modern, and the many forms of expressionism have been particularly opposed to symmetrical structures. Still, the sense of equilibrium has a strong appeal, and symmetrical forms are taken for granted in almost every other culture and every other historical period, and I see no reason to avoid it in my own work. Right balances left, top reflects bottom, and one can go directly to the center of things.

I had been thinking a lot about all this around 1980, when Stephen Dydo gave me permission to use his music typewriter. These machines, which are rare in the United States, and apparently non-existent in Europe, enable someone like myself to type all the standard musical symbols with machine accuracy, just as easily and quickly as concrete poets are able to make visual arrangements of words and letters. I found the music typewriter an ideal medium for exploring logical geometrical forms and patterns, and in a few months I accumulated over 50 music-typewriter drawings that I called "symmetries." At the time I didn't think too much about how one might harmonize and arrange them, and made a purely visual collection. It was a kind of conceptual music.

Soon afterward, the desire to actually play and hear these curious structures induced me to write some of them out for piano four hands, and in performing these arrangements, most often with Philip Corner, I began to appreciate the literal correlation between the visual images of the drawings and the aural images of the musical realizations. The music really sounded the way it looked, and looked the way it sounded. Yet curiously, there were still differences. Drawings that looked almost simplistic sometimes produced sequences of harmonies that were quite unusual. Sometimes white spaces that seemed like large holes in the drawings translated into musical silences that were hardly perceptible. Sometimes rhythms were much easier to hear than to see. Sometimes I had a strong personal preference for the visual over the aural, or vice versa, a feeling that was hard to explain, since the two were completely analogous.

In the following years the Symmetries have been performed quite a few times by quite a few different interpreters, but I doubt that anyone has studied the music as thoroughly and played it as carefully as Samuel Vriezen and Dante Boon, so I am particularly pleased that this duo has agreed to make the first recording of the piece.

Tom Johnson, Paris, 2005

credits

released March 19, 2024

Tom Johnson (Colorado, 1939) - Symmetries (1981-1990)

Recorded on 6th May 2004 and 2nd November at the studio Grasland, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Sound engineer: Guido Tichelman

Previously released by Karnatic Lab Records (KLR 010), The Netherlands, May 2006

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Dante Boon Amsterdam, Netherlands

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