TOM JOHNSON Failing a very difficult piece for solo string bass (1975)

Tom Johnson () Failing a very difficult piece for solo string bass (1975) Edwin Barker, double bass Although the challenges it poses to performers transcend the circumstances of its composition, it is a piece suggestive of a certain time and place. "Failing" was the product of the period Johnson spent living in New York City in the 1970's and early 1980's. Composed in 1975, the piece was one of his works of the time--1972's "The Four Note Opera" was another--that incorporated self-referential texts--that is, texts explicating what was happening within the performance as it was happening. "Failing" was originally written for John Deak who at the time was the Associate Principal Bassist of the New York Philharmonic. Johnson composed "Failing" from a piano piece he'd been working on. As he told Dan Warburton in a 2007 interview for Paris Transatlantic, he "liked the absurdity of the idea of having to play and talk at the same time." The absurdity and the difficulty: "Failing" is a hard piece to play, and even though it's become something of an off-center standard for double bassists in the decades since it was composed, it remains a challenge even given the general advances in performers' technical abilities that those decades have seen. The instrumental component consists in a cumulatively more complex set of chromatic fragments; the text is a purposefully prolix monologue of over 1250 words augmented by a spoken improvisation. "Failing" isn't quite the shaggy dog story it's sometimes been called, or if it is, it's one given to chasing its own tail in a conceptual loop of (apparent) self-contradiction. There's something Dadaesque about the paradoxical logic that underlies it; not quite as extreme as the deliberately unplayable pieces Johnson assembled for his 1974 collection Imaginary Music, but self-subverting nevertheless. Self-subverting to the point that one might legitimately ask: Can a performance ever succeed? Can it ever fail? Daniel Barbiero