There are records and there are records, and then there are wonderful records. This is a VERY WONDERFUL record. I feel completely at ease with this music, but not only that. I feel at home and I feel I’m on a great adventure, all at the same time. I feel emotionally, aesthetically and intellectually uplifted, and the view from the vantage point of this music is inspiring.
I listen a first time lying on my back in the gravity of the planet, flat out on my bed after a busy day at the police station with interview after interview in a hectic case of repeated thefts from old people at an old age home.

I listened as my body disappeared down into the sea of gravity while my mind disconnected from the anatomy and soared upwards, sailing like a seagull above the white-capped waves, circling effortlessly in the sound of this clarinet in the clean air.

Right after this first experience of Tom Johnson’s music, I watched a TV program on Dag Hammarskjold, which kept me up there soaring the expanses of human dignity and the stubborn strength of the uncorrupted will.
Then I began listening to this CD over again, realizing that I’ll return to Tom Johnson’s music often in the future, as it nourishes me and elates me in a new and quite unexpected way.

Stockhausen and Riley. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley. Somewhere at the crossroads of these composers, of these spirits, I meet Tom Johnson – and Terry and Karlheinz have no idea they’ve intersected!
Bach looms too, or, rather, spiritually immerses the music, in a transferred sense, revealing himself in the orderly, architectural, geometrical clarity! Wow!

There are some obscurities concerning the booklet text, though. I can’t find any indication as to who wrote it. Nonetheless, I’ll quote it here, in part, because it lays down the prerequisites for Rational Melodies:

It is also stated that the Rational Melodies are composed “by rigorous adherence to logical premises” – but not being a mathematician, I don’t understand the underlying structure of the compositions, so I would badly need more text on these works, with the scientific background. Stockhausen has composed numerous works with certain rules, which, applied as indicated, still allows for – actually calls for – innumerable variations, indeed resulting in sounding results that are very far apart from each other. Stockhausen always describes these rules in his booklets, though, in depth, so you can easily understand how the works come about. I’d wish for a similar in depth explanation here, but I don’t even find that on the web.

The music – as is – doesn’t need any scientific explanation to be heard, though. It’s just that the overwhelming sense of purity and the fascinating simplicity and clarity make me very curious, and especially so, when this underlying, arithmetic recipe is hinted at in the booklet.

The Rational Melodies are 21, ranging from 1’02 to 3’10 in duration.

They are all different from each other. The first one, for example, comes across in a wave motion of sort of breaking waves, with – it seems – two melodies contained in one, breathing away like a natural phenomenon that just is, by and for and of itself.
The sound is so good, so close and clear, giving you no place to hide, and you wouldn’t want to, unless your one of those who are afraid of beauty and the way it might affect your innermost, guarded self.
The second Rational Melody is quite different from no. 1, spiraling away in the fashion of a running and leaping Mediterranean Greek boy good with golden locks, carefree and joyous in a timeless sense. The music is fast, glimmering and glistening, radiating blinding rays of light that tickle your retina and illuminate your brain in stroboscopic showers of photons. Magnificent! This music reminds me of a dream I lived and lost.

And so it progresses, one melody after the other, the successor different from the predecessor, until the 21 melodies are all executed by brilliant clarinetist Roger Heaton.

There is a strange property inherent in these recordings, though, especially noticeable through earphones or via really good speakers. It sounds just as if a rock concert was going on in another hall of the same building, the base sounds leaking into Tom Johnson’s music. It’s not disturbing, because it is so different from the clarinet sounds, and also flowing harmoniously. It kind of sounds like the murmur of the city, too, from inside a building. I like to think of it as the rest – the rest of everything, the humming of the Universe, the wash of blood through the veins of Beings, or the language of deities exchanged through the clouds… In fact, it gives me some extra inspiration! Strange feeling for someone like me to get! I recall when I returned Gidon Kremer’s Philips recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin, because they contained the heavy humming of heavy trucks passing the studio. I also made a racket about Rachel Podger’s recording on Channel Classics of the same work, having the proprietor of the label promising me to record in a remote Swedish rural church the next time. However, like I said, the murmur is different on this ANTS CD, not bothering me. A big difference is that the Kremer recording, and the Podger one too, had been edited heavily, resulting in truck sounds suddenly cut off, or suddenly starting, making it impossible to enjoy the music, which appeared to flow continuously above these cut-off trucks gearing up and down!

These recordings by Roger Heaton of Tom Johnson’s Rational Melodies constitute a wonderful success all around, really lifting my spirit considerably! Many thanks!

The Bedtime Stories are likewise wonderful recordings! They remind me of some of my son’s favorite tales, like Tomie de Paola’s story about The Clown of God, and they also remind me of the early melodramas of late Swedish composer Sven-Erik Bäck, like Kattresan (The Cat’s Journey) (1957) – a children’s play to a text by Ivar Arosenius, and Tranfjädrarna (The Feathers of the Crane) (1956) to a text by Bertil Malmberg built on a fairytale play by Junji Konoshita, as well as Fågeln (The Bird) (1961); an opera in 15 scenes built on a play by Aleksander Obrenovic. The humble, mysterious and somehow cosmic properties of these works fall in with Tom Johnson’s Bedtime Stories, because they make you feel the same way as Tom Johnson’s work does. I think of haikus, and I think of fables. This is very hard to formulate in words, but the bottom line is that the works mentioned and Tom Johnson’s Bedtime Stories all bring you to a Beyond that is the true essence of which this world is a mere reflection. Does that make any sense to you? Those are my feelings, anyhow: strong feelings – and that is why, in part, I am so thrilled and uplifted by the Johnson works on this CD. There is a merciful magic at play, a silver lining ‘round all the pain of physical existence.

The Bedtime Stories are a number – 12, to be precise - of short stories, all illustrated by the clarinet. One story, for example, goes:

Another Bedtime Story begins with the clarinet playing a succession of notes in ascending pitches, adding one higher note at the end each time, like this, after which the story begins:

I suppose the first note each time is the bottom floor, since he plays 13 notes in the end, and the number of stairs is 12 – or is the 13th note the floor upstairs?

Anyway, the stories are varied, and the clarinet, in some simple but clever way, illustrates the story.

A completely wonderful CD, that brightens my day a lot! Intelligent, playful, ingenious, sly, tricky - and recorded in a close, brilliant sound.