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.
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