New York

Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85

Published

1 year ago

January 5, 2025

Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85

Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York during the 1970s, and whose own compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical clarity, died on Tuesday at his home in Paris. He was 85.

His wife and only immediate survivor, the performance artist Esther Ferrer, said the cause was a stroke following long-term emphysema.

Mr. Johnson was a young New York composer in need of income in 1971 when he noticed that the exciting performances he heard downtown were not being covered by local news outlets. He offered to write about the contemporary music scene for The Voice, and he soon began a weekly column.

It was an opportune moment: Art galleries, lofts and venues like the Kitchen were presenting concerts by young experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson became the emerging scene’s chief chronicler.

“No one realized at the time that one of the most significant genres of serious music of the century was developing, a genre that was to become known as American minimalism, and which would find imitators all over the world,” he wrote in 1983, in his final Voice column.

He charted the rise of musical minimalism, including the transformation of the local composer Phil Glass to an international phenomenon, but he also documented radical work by lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wada, who sang through massive plumbing pipes; Jim Burton, who amplified bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncanny drones on a synthesizer.

“I learned some interesting things about gongs on May 30 at a Centre Street loft concert,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 show by the young composer Rhys Chatham. “That gongs have many different pitches, most of which don’t make much sense in terms of the overtone series; that different tones stand out, depending on how the gong is struck; that when a gong makes a crescendo, a wonderful whoosh of high sound streams into the room; that loud gongs vibrate the floor in a special way and put an odd charge in the air; that listening to gongs, played alone for over an hour, is an extraordinary experience.”

By describing such outré happenings in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson provided a national readership with access to performances that might be attended by only a dozen listeners, and possibly never heard again. He saw himself as a participant within the scene, and he provided such generous coverage that he became known among composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, collected in the 1989 book “The Voice of New Music,” offer a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical era; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang in the chorus for a rehearsal of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera “Einstein on the Beach.”

But Mr. Johnson was also unafraid to critique concerts that he thought didn’t work conceptually, or note when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal risks. He once devoted a thousand words to reviewing “one of the most impressive performances I ever heard”: the warbling of a mockingbird on Long Island.

He was among the first writers to begin using the term “minimal” to describe much of the repetitive music he heard, and he applied the word to his own compositions, such as the hypnotic 1971 work “An Hour for Piano.” “I have always been very proud of it, because that’s the only word that really describes what I’m doing,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I always worked with reduced materials and tried to do simple music.”

In Mr. Johnson’s dryly postmodern “Four Note Opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — on only the notes A, B, D and E. The first performance, in 1972, had an audience of about 10 people; the opera has since received more than 100 productions. For “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked among a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for nearly an hour, chiming them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and physical exertion.

In the 1980s, he immersed himself in Euclid’s number theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, eager to find new musical structures. His compositions of this period include “Rational Melodies,” a series of entrancing miniatures built from simple, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that can be found in a single octave.

Though undergirded by his mathematical exercises, Mr. Johnson’s music is visceral and intelligible — and, often, deliberately predictable — rather than abstruse. “There is something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (the music) seems to arise naturally from some discovery outside of myself, and where everything comes together with a minimum of tampering (of composing),” he once wrote.

Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on Nov. 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colo., a small farming community. His parents, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, were teachers.

When he was about 7, Tom began playing the piano intermittently, and he found his passion for music at age 13 under the tutelage of a local piano teacher, Rita Hutcherson, who also encouraged his composing.

Though many of his peers attended nearby universities, Ms. Hutcherson urged Mr. Johnson to apply to Yale, where he received a bachelor’s degree in arts in 1961 and a master’s in music in 1967. As an undergraduate, he took a seminar with the prestigious composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the musical academy, but he found himself embracing repetition and stasis instead of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to study privately with the experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him find his artistic voice.

After documenting the New York scene for The Voice but struggling to have his own work performed, Mr. Johnson decamped to Paris in 1983, where fresh opportunities awaited, as European audiences were newly drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific writer, theorizing about his own music in several books. He had been publishing his own scores since the 1970s, and he maintained an active web presence with a video series elucidating his music.

His major works have included the satirical “Riemannoper,” based on excerpts from a famed German music lexicon, which has received more than 30 productions; and a more serious oratorio drawing on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But much of Mr. Johnson’s output remained resolutely abstract, including an orchestral work that lays out a sequence of 360 chords and a series of recent pieces that systematically explore various rhythmic combinations.

Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan ended in divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.

One of Mr. Johnson’s compositions has become canonic in the double-bass community: “Failing” (1975), a fiendishly difficult and hilarious exercise in which a soloist is instructed to bow tricky passages while reading a lengthy text aloud that self-reflexively comments on the music. “These pieces all had to do with making music as real life,” Mr. Johnson said of the work in a 2020 interview. “I wanted the performer to confront an unknown situation and deal with it as well as possible in a one-time-only context.”

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New York

How a Parks Worker Lives on $37,500 in Tompkinsville, Staten Island

Published

2 days ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

How a Parks Worker Lives on ,500 in Tompkinsville, Staten Island

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Sara Robinson boarded a Greyhound bus from Oregon to New York City to attend Hunter College in the early 2000s, bright-eyed and eager to pick up odd jobs to fuel her dream of living there.

For a long time, she made it work. But recently, that has been more challenging than ever.

Right around her 40th birthday, Ms. Robinson began to feel financially squeezed in Brooklyn, where she had lived for years. Ms. Robinson (no relation to this reporter) was also feeling too grown to live with roommates.

“As a child,” she said, “you don’t think you’re going to have a roommate at 40.” She decided to move into a place of her own: a one-bedroom apartment in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island.

After she moved, the preschool where she’d worked for over a decade closed. Now, she works two jobs. She is a seasonal employee for the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, working from Tuesday to Saturday. And on Monday nights, she sells concessions at the West Village movie theater Film Forum, which pays $25 an hour plus tips.

Ms. Robinson, now 45, loves her job as an environmental educator at a state park on Staten Island. Her team runs the park’s social media accounts and comes up with event programming, like a recent project tapping maple trees to make syrup.

But the role is temporary. Her last stint was from June 2024 to January 2025. Then she was unemployed until August 2025. Ms. Robinson’s current contract will be up in April, unless she gets an extension or a different parks job opens up.

Ms. Robinson’s biweekly pay stubs from the parks department amount to about $1,300 before taxes. She barely felt a difference, she said, while she was out of work and pocketing around $880 every two weeks from her unemployment checks. (Her previous parks gig paid $1,100 a check.)

Living in New York’s Greenest Borough

“It used to be, ‘There’s no way I’m moving to Staten Island,’” Ms. Robinson said. “But the place is close to the water. I’m three minutes from the ferry. The rest is history.” She lives on the third floor of a multifamily house, above an art studio and another tenant. Her rent is $1,600 a month, plus $125 in utilities, including her phone bill.

“If my situation changes, I don’t know if I could find something similar,” she said. “So much of my New York life has been feeling trapped to an apartment. You get a place for a good price, and you’re like, ‘I can’t leave now.’”

Staten Island is convenient for Ms. Robinson’s parks job, but it’s become harder to justify living in a borough where she knows few people. It takes more than an hour to get to friends in Brooklyn, an especially hard trek during the winter. After four years of living on Staten Island, Ms. Robinson feels somewhat isolated.

“All my friends on Staten Island are senior citizens,” she said. “It’s great. I love it. But I do want friends closer to my age.”

One of Ms. Robinson’s friends, Ray, took her on nature walks and taught her about tree identification, sparking an interest in mycology, the study of mushrooms. This led to a productive — and free — fungi foraging hobby during unemployment. She has found all sorts of mushrooms, including, after a month of searching, the elusive morel.

The Budgeting Game

Ms. Robinson doesn’t update her furniture often, but when she does, she shops stoop sales in Park Slope or other parts of Brooklyn.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” she said. “You could make a whole apartment off the street, off the stuff that people throw away.”

She also makes a game out of grocery shopping, biking to Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Manhattan’s Chinatown to go to stores where there are better deals. She budgets about $300 for groceries each month.

Ms. Robinson bikes almost everywhere, sometimes traveling a little farther to enter the Staten Island Railway at one of the stations that don’t charge a fare. She spends $80 a month on subway and ferry fares, and $5 a month for a discounted Citi Bike membership she gets through a credit union, though she usually uses her own bike. She is handy and does repairs herself.

There are certain splurges — Ms. Robinson drops $400 once or twice a year on round-trip airfare to Seattle, where her family lives. She also spent $100 last year to see a concert at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

She said she has many financial saving graces. She has no student loans and no car to make payments on. She doesn’t get health insurance from her jobs, but she qualifies for Medicaid.

She mostly eats at home, though sometimes friends will treat her to dinner. She repays them with tickets to Film Forum movies.

Nothing Beats the Twinkling Lights

Ms. Robinson’s friends often talk about leaving the city — and the country.

Two friends have their eyes set on Sweden, where they hope to get the affordable child care and social safety net they are struggling to access in New York.

Ms. Robinson can’t see herself moving elsewhere in the United States, but she is entertaining the idea of an international move if she can’t hack it on Staten Island.

Yet the pull of the city is hard for her to resist.

“I just get a rush when I’m riding the Staten Island Ferry across the bay,” she said. “You see all the little twinkling lights. It’s this feeling of, ‘everything is possible here.’”

That feeling, plus the many friendly faces Ms. Robinson sees every day — the ferry operators, the conductors on the Staten Island Railway, her co-workers at Film Forum — are what tie her to New York.

“My savings are not increasing, so there’s that,” she said. “But I’ve been OK so far. I think I’m going to figure it out.”

New York

How the Editor in Chief of Marie Claire Gets Styled for a Trip to Italy

Published

3 days ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

How the Editor in Chief of Marie Claire Gets Styled for a Trip to Italy

Nikki Ogunnaike, the editor in chief of Marie Claire magazine, did not grow up the scion of an Anna Wintour or a Marc Jacobs.

But, she said, “my mom and dad are both very stylish people.”

They got dressed up to go to church every week in her hometown Springfield, Va. Her mother managed a Staples; her father, a CVS. “Presentation is important to them,” she said.

Since landing her first internship with Glamour magazine in college, Ms. Ogunnaike, 40, has held editorial roles there and at Elle magazine and GQ. She has been in the top post at Marie Claire since 2023.

She recently spent a Saturday with The New York Times as she prepared for Milan Fashion Week.

New York

How a Physical Therapist and a Retiree Live on $208,000 in Harlem

Published

1 week ago

February 21, 2026

Press Room

How a Physical Therapist and a Retiree Live on 8,000 in Harlem

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

It has never really occurred to Marian or Charles Wade to live anywhere but the city where they were born and where they raised their children.

New York is in their bones. “We have our roots here, and our families enjoyed life here before us,” Ms. Wade said.

And they feel lucky. Between Mr. Wade’s pension, earned after more than 40 years as an analyst at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and his Social Security benefits, along with Ms. Wade’s work as a physical therapist at a psychiatric center, they bring in about $208,000 a year.

Still, it’s hard for the couple not to notice how much the city has changed as it has become wealthier.

About 10 years ago, Ms. Wade, 65, and Mr. Wade, 69, sold the Morningside Heights apartment they had lived in for decades. The Manhattan neighborhood had become more affluent, and tensions over how their building should be managed and how much residents should be expected to pay for upkeep boiled over between people who had lived there for years and newer neighbors.

They found a new home in Harlem, large enough to fit their two children, who are now adults struggling to afford the city’s housing market.

All in the Family

Ms. Wade knew it was time to leave Morningside Heights when she spotted her husband hiding behind a bush outside their building, hoping to avoid an unpleasant new neighbor. They had bought their apartment in 1994 for $206,000, using some money they had inherited from their families, and sold it in 2015 for $1.13 million.

The couple found a new apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem for $811,000, and put most of the money down upfront. They took out a loan with a good rate for the remaining cost, and had a $947 monthly payment. They recently finished paying off the mortgage, but they have monthly maintenance payments of $1,555, as well as two temporary assessments to help improve the building, totaling $415 a month.

Their two children each moved home shortly after graduating from college.

The couple’s son, Jacob Wade, 28, split an apartment with three roommates nearby for a while, but spent down his savings and moved back in with his parents. He is searching for an affordable one bedroom nearby and plans to move out later in the year. Their daughter, Elka Wade, 27, came home after college but recently moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, with roommates.

Until their daughter moved out a few weeks ago, she and her brother each took a bedroom, and Mr. and Ms. Wade slept in the dining room, which they had converted into their bedroom with the help of a Murphy bed and a new set of curtains for privacy.

There is very little storage space. A piano occupies an entire closet in their son’s bedroom, because the family has no other place to fit it.

The setup is cramped, but close quarters have their benefits: When their daughter, a classically trained cellist, was living there, she often practiced at home in the evenings. “I love listening to her play,” Ms. Wade said.

Three Foodtowns and a Thrift Shop

The Wades do what they can to keep their costs low. They’ve decided against installing new, better insulated windows in their drafty apartment. They don’t go on vacations, instead visiting their small weekend home in rural upstate New York. And they’ve pulled back on takeout food and retail shopping.

Instead, Mr. Wade surveys the three Foodtown supermarkets near their home for the best deals, preferring one for produce and another for meat. The weekly grocery bill has been around $500 with both kids living at home, and the family usually orders delivery twice a week, rotating between Chinese and Indian food, which typically costs $70, including leftovers.

For an occasional splurge, they love Pisticci, a nearby restaurant where the penne with homemade mozzarella costs $21.

The couple owns a car, which they park on the street for free. But they often use public transportation to avoid paying the $9 congestion pricing fee to drive downtown, or when they have a good parking spot they don’t want to give up. They have a senior discount for their transit cards, which allows them to pay $1.50 per subway or bus ride, rather than $3.

Ms. Wade stopped shopping at the stores she used to frequent, like Eileen Fisher and Banana Republic, years ago. Instead, she visits a thrift store called Unique Boutique on the Upper West Side. She was browsing the aisles a few months ago, before a big Thanksgiving dinner, and spotted the perfect dress for the occasion for just $20.

But she has one nonnegotiable weekly expense: a private yoga lesson in an instructor’s apartment nearby, for $150 a session.

Elka Wade, a cellist, often practices at home, to the delight of her parents. Bess Adler for The New York Times

Swapping Mortgage Payments for Singing Lessons

For every member of the Wade family, life in New York is all about the arts.

The children each attended the Special Music School, a public school focused on the arts. Their son, an actor, teacher and director, works part time at the Metropolitan Opera and the Kaufman Music Center, a performing arts complex in Manhattan. His sister works in administration at the Kaufman Center.

Mr. Wade is still close with friends from high school who are now professional musicians, and the couple often goes to see them play at venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where shows typically have a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum.

The couple has cut back on going to expensive concerts — they used to try to see Elvis Costello every time he came to New York, for example — but have timeworn strategies for getting affordable theater tickets.

They recently splurged on tickets to “Oedipus” on Broadway for themselves and their daughter, who they treated to a ticket as a birthday gift. The seats were in the nosebleed section, but still cost $80 apiece.

The couple has a $75 annual membership to the Film Forum, which gives them reduced price tickets to movies. They occasionally get discounted tickets to the opera through their son’s work, and when they don’t, they pay for family circle passes, which are usually $47 a head, plus a $10 fee.

Ms. Wade, who grew up commuting from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan to take dance lessons, sometimes takes $20 drop-in ballet classes during the week at the Dance Theater of Harlem, just a few blocks away from the apartment.

Recently, when the couple paid off their mortgage, Ms. Wade celebrated by giving herself a treat: weekly private singing lessons, for $125 a session.