Thomas Floyd Johnson (November 18, 1939 – December 31, 2024) was an American composer and music critic associated with minimalism.

Thomas Floyd Johnson was born in Greeley, Colorado, on November 18, 1939, where he received a religious education at a Methodist church, which influenced his work.

[5] His writings were instrumental in the emergence of composers including Gavin Bryars, Cage, Brian Eno, Luc Ferrari, Glass, Phill Niblock, Éliane Radigue.

[5] Johnson considered himself a minimalist composer, and was the first to apply this term to music in his article "The Slow-Motion Minimal Approach", written for The Village Voice in 1972.

His minimalism is of a formalist type, depending mostly on logical sequences, as in the 21 Rational Melodies (1982), where he explored procedures such as accumulation, counting, and isorhythm.

Later he collaborated with iving mathematicians, particularly Jean-Paul Allouche, Emmanuel Amiot, Jeff Dinitz, and Franck Jedrzejewski.

[9] Johnson introduced text and visual images to produce a theatrical atmosphere close to performance art.

The librettos for his operas, which he almost always wrote himself, describe what takes place in the music in an objective manner, somewhat reminiscent of Pirandello.

Words intervene in many of his works, sometimes by a narrator who explains how the music is made, as in Eggs and Baskets (1987) and Narayana's Cows (1989).

[5] The association of text and music led Johnson to write numerous radio pieces,[11] most often for René Farabet (France Culture)[4] and for Klaus Schöning [de] (WDR).