The Brooklyn Rail

There is something deeply oxymoronic about human beings inventing the concept of reason. Any study of history, much less any self-examination or the experience of living in America in 2025, means constant confrontation with irrationality: cults, manias, willful ignorance, self-deception, hiding from reality, pseudo-science, religion. That last one is an interesting case, as self-proclaimed rational arguments for religious faith from the likes of G. K. Chesterton and his less capable contemporary minions are always built on the intellectually dishonest and irrational idea that because something cannot at the moment be explained or comprehended then it can only exist because of something supernatural.

They give mysticism, and belief, a bad name. Their impulse isn’t rationalism but authoritarianism, to have other people reflect their own rightness by sharing their beliefs. They also devalue reason and rational thinking, which are real and useful tools because humans aren’t fundamentally rational. Why else do we have poetry and psychedelic drugs? We can’t only be rational, fully rational, because we have imaginations, we make abstract things, like composer Tom Johnson made his piece Rational Melodies.

Johnson died in Paris this past New Year’s Eve at the age of eighty-five. He was part of the first generation of minimalist composers, and, as the new music critic for the Village Voice, he coined the genre label “minimalism” in his 1972 article, “the Slow-Motion Minimal Approach.” Rational Melodies, as a title, suggests a manifesto-like concept, and that’s fair to some extent but also a little misleading if you don’t think about it carefully. Johnson wasn’t a purely rational composer, although his technical methodology was very much a working through of possible permutations of a thematic idea in an orderly fashion that could turn obsessive. His titles give some indication of his musical process, but they also describe the music in terms that are both objective and instructional. Think of Rational Melodies, An Hour for Piano, and The Chord Catalogue as books that, when you open them, contain just what the cover says.

But here’s the actual mystery of actual music: what’s inside is a set of instructions that produce experiences. The titles are less like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians or Philip Glass’s Music in the Shape of a Square than like Sol LeWitt’s beautiful wall drawings and paintings. And LeWitt, with his titles that are also instructions for how to make the works, was often much closer to being a composer than a visual artist. Think of Johnson the same way: Rational Melodies is an explicit working out of the basic techniques of constructing a melody; An Hour for Piano is a one-hour piece that goes through minimalist variations of a simple motif (like if Erik Satie’s Vexations was theme and variations); the monumental The Chord Catalogue, also for piano, has sections like “The 1287 eight-note chords.” Like LeWitt, Johnson’s titles are granularly descriptive of what the music is, rather than generic titles, like minuet, that indicate a form.

Which brings us to his masterpiece, Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass. This is one of the greatest works of music as both practice and philosophy in that it turns the former into the latter, and vice versa. It uses reason and logic to find a way into mystery and even unreason—the impossibility of rationality at the extreme edge of both technique and expression. In Failing, the performer reads a narration that describes exactly what they are doing and will do in real time, and also explains the point of the piece, which is to fail. While the listener doesn’t see the notes on the score, they do hear everything that’s supposed to happen.

This starts with the bass player speaking:

In Failing, I am required to read a long text while playing music written above the text. The text must be read out loud at a more or less normal pace, and I must not allow the music to slow me down. The task is fairly easy for a while, because there is not much music, and most of it comes at the ends of clauses and sentences, almost like normal punctuation. Later on, there is more music, and the task becomes more difficult—so difficult, in fact, that I will probably not be able to do it without either slowing down my reading speed or else making mistakes in the music. At least the composer feels confident that I will eventually begin to run into trouble, which is why he called the piece Failing.

Failing is about failing, about not being able to perform something successfully. As the piece moves along, the music grows more technically demanding while the text becomes denser; it gets increasingly difficult to perform it, and the psychology of reading out loud while playing an instrument means that stress and self-consciousness push the performer to rush the tempo, and—as the instructions are to maintain a steady speaking and playing pace—that’s a failure. Eventually, the combination of the two is simply too much—including the demand that they both improvise on the instrument and also improvise their speech in a way that is seamless with the notated part—for the bass player not to make mistakes and to fail in strict performance terms.

(Failure is also a very difficult piece to experience live. There’s one recording of it, on the New World Records compilation Bang On A Can Live Vol. 1, but otherwise it’s rarely played in public. That’s classical music culture; there’s only so much interest in solo bass performers—meaning none at all outside of Edgar Meyer—and new music groups have mostly left minimalism behind. You have to hang around the conservatives and catch the recitals musicians play for their degree requirements, because for a bassist with any spark in their mind, this is irresistible. You can find many recital performance videos on YouTube.)

On the surface, Failing is a plain, rational demonstration of a proposition, one that’s not only fascinating and intellectually stimulating, but funny: “But I have practiced the piece quite a bit (and that is a fact, as well as simply a line in the text).” There’s talk about how, since the audience doesn’t know the score, they can’t exactly tell if the bassist is making any mistakes:

People might be very impressed by my playing and think that I had succeeded in playing a piece which the composer thought could not be played successfully by any bass player. But of course, leaving out the hardest parts like that, I would be cheating, and the performance would not really be a success at all, since the piece is about failing. By now Failing is extremely difficult. That is, the piece called “Failing” is extremely difficult.

But the mind-blowing thing about Failing is the paradox of it. The point of Failing is failure, and “any successful performance must be a qualified failure.” That is, as the text goes, “Failing is about failing, and if I succeed in playing everything accurately without slowing down my speaking, or cheating, or anything, I will fail to fail, and thus will miss the point.”

That deserves a pause to think, to toss it around in the mind. Failing is a performing work that is designed for the performer to fail at executing the instructions. To fail to perform the score exactly as written means to deliver a successful performance, and if some incredible musician, somewhere, someday, were to be able to nail every last bit of the piece, that would be a failure of the performance, a failure to bring to life and express the instructions that Johnson wrote, and to show what Johnson means and values. Here is where he splits away from what LeWitt did, because Failure is a set of instructions for a science experiment that is meant to end in disaster, and if it doesn’t then you’ve fucked it up!

If Failure is a product of reason, and it is, then that quality is inseparable from absurdity, if not madness. It is reasonable to fail when, as in art and science, that failure leads to a better understanding of what can succeed, what is right, what works. Bad art, failed art, is just as valuable as good art, and recognizing the value of failure is eminently rational. The only people who are never wrong are, as we see around us, dangerous, if not insane.