Albert C. Johnston, Jr.
“The Unknown American Composer”
Early Life
Albert C. Johnston Jr. was born on December 19, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts to Dr. Albert C. Johnston and Thyra Baumann Johnston, a medical doctor and a creative housewife. At age 2 they moved to Gorham, New Hampshire where his father opened his practice as a family physician.
Albert was studious and at the top of his class. His father strongly encouraged that. At the age of 6 he began taking piano lessons under a rigid disciplined school of training. His piano teacher was a lady from Poland who would put pennies on his fingers when he played in order to curl his knuckles just right. If the pennies fell off his fingers, she would whack him over the knuckles with a wooden ruler. He was classically trained with the exercises of Czerny, Bach Inventions and the traditional 16th to 19th century piano pieces.
In his early teens he was fascinated with boogie-woogie, blues, and popular tunes. At times he would lock himself in his room playing, practicing, and listening to composers such as Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, Fats Waller, and Meade Lux Lewis. Outside of his studies he enjoyed skiing and started the first ski team at the all-boys prep school he attended; Mount Hermon (now Northfield Mount Hermon), in Massachusetts.
College Years
Albert Sr., being a medical doctor, naturally wanted his son to also be in that field, so he enrolled Albert Jr. as a freshman at Dartmouth University. In his sophomore year, he went on to continue his studies in music and moved to Los Angeles, California, where he enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC) which is still one of the top universities in the U.S. for music.
Upon moving, he was in the real light among music professionals and composers. His first and second cousins on his mother’s side lived in Los Angeles, originally from Louisiana, were involved in popular music. This was a big influence on Albert Jr. besides his music studies at USC. He got involved with his cousins in pop, rhythm, and blues music. His mother’s cousin, Leon René, wrote a number of songs that made it on the charts in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”, “I Sold my Heart to the Junkman”, Boogie Woogie Santa Claus”, “When it’s Sleepy Time Down South”(with brother Otis René and Clarence Muse, which became Louis Armstrong’s theme song), and “Rockin’ Robin” (which Michael Jackson later made a big hit out of in 1972).
He then got the yearning to go back to New Hampshire and enrolled at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) where he studied under Robert W. Manton, who was a student of the French composer and teacher Vincent d’Indy, a student of César Franck. While attending UNH he met with Serge Koussevitzky, the longtime conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), who recognized that Albert was a gifted young creative composer.
Albert later went on to graduate school at Princeton University where he studied composition under the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. From there he wrote a Scherzo in F sharp minor for piano as an assignment for one of his composition classes.
Years later he orchestrated it for a full String Orchestra. While attending Princeton he wrote a few more serious compositions. “Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra” was inspired by a schoolmate from Bermuda.
In 1948 he composed a symphonic tempestuous dance “Mood Seduction” for full orchestra that has many shifting changes in rhythm cadence and accents. He once described it as a wide cross between Duke Ellington’s “Carnival” and Ravel’s “Bolero”. That year he met with conductor Arthur Fielder of the Boston Pops Orchestra with the orchestral score of Mood Seduction. Fielder looked over the orchestral score and replied to Albert that it is very interesting, but their patrons were currently requesting pieces like the Warsaw Concerto to be performed. Mood Seduction is only 5 minutes long and would make an excellent encore piece after a performance of Ravel’s Bolero.
Professional Years
After leaving Princeton he took up a profession in the textiles industry in New York City’s garment district. There he learned all about fabric and went on to be the buyer for major department stores for their bedding and linen department.
In 1950 he married Clara, who was from Dayton, Ohio. They moved back to Los Angeles where he got a position with the department store May Company, running the bedding and linen department. Albert continued playing and composing music. This is where he met and collaborated with the African-American symphonic composer William Grant Still, who resided in Los Angeles. He guided Albert on certain orchestral suggestions. One suggestion Still made was in Albert’s piece for orchestra called “Mysterious Prelude”. One piano note of the piece was a sharp strike (fortissimo fff) on the last high note on the piano. Still suggested to use two high pitched pieces of steel to get that sharp piercing effect Albert wanted. This was a piece that was inspired by Albert after coming home from the movies seeing Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. He could not get the probing sound of the submarine submerged under the sea out of his mind so he wrote this piece in the middle of the night. It has a continuous bass line (basso ostinato) that runs throughout the whole piece with a number of dissonant tones and somewhat atonal motifs. He described this to be the most imaginative piece he ever composed. It was also meant to be one of four movements in a very colorfully orchestrated “incomplete” suite he was composing. It was called the “California Indian Suite” in which Mysterious Prelude was going to be depicting the movement of the Mojave Desert. Four movements – Tahoe, Mojave, Yosemite, Sequoia.
In 1957 they moved to Sacramento, California, where he was positioned with another department store as a buyer of bedding and linens. He decided he wanted to open his own business in textiles. With the financial support of his father he opened a yardage store in Watsonville, California, a farming area in the Monterey Bay area. Albert, Clara, and their now two sons, Albert III and Bruce resided nearby in the coastal town of Aptos. There, he met the American composer Lou Harrison, who taught at San Jose State University and resided in Aptos.. Harrison introduced Albert to various sounds of Asian tonality such as the Gamelan. He was a regular at a restaurant where a group of artists would congregate and share their artistic views. The restaurant was called The Sticky Wicket, which became a touchstone for lovers of art, music, poetry, and other Bohemians in the Santa Cruz area in the 1960’s. Lou Harrison often performed many of his compositions at The Sticky Wicket, making the restaurant the birthplace of the Cabrillo Music Festival.
In 1961 Dr. Corbelita Astraquillo performed Albert’s vocalize called “Gabi” for dramatic soprano and piano. Gabi, in most Filipino dialects means “of the night”. It is a very ethereal nocturnal piece in a minor mode. Albert composed this piece for Dr. Astraquillo who was an operatic soprano from the Philippines that toured and taught vocals.
Mid Life to Final Years
Albert made a trip by himself to Lake Tahoe on the California/Nevada state border and played his hand on the gambling tables. He won a good amount of money twice that same evening which he developed a lifetime affection of gambling. Shortly after this he decided to be closer to the gambling tables of Nevada. He sold out his partnership of his yardage shop to his partner Betty Irvine and moved the family to Reno, Nevada, where he welcomed his third son David. He was positioned with a local upscale department store running their bedding and linen department. He continuously played and composed during this time.
In 1967 he wrote a nocturne in G minor for piano that has a very colorful and mystical display of parallel minor 3rd intervals. He frequently went over the mountain to Lake Tahoe a very beautiful environment which inspired him to write both music and poetry. In 1966 his parents decided to leave Keene, New Hampshire where Dr. Johnston had been the town doctor for 35 years and move to Hawaii to semi-retire. They ended up on the island of Kauai where Dr. Johnston, a radiologist, set up the hospital’s first radiology department. Albert was soon to follow in 1968 and moved to Honolulu on the island of O’ahu. There, he was the buyer for the bedding and linens department of Liberty House (now Macy’s).
Years later he went into semi-retirement and worked part time as a salesman for Thayer Piano, the only Steinway piano dealership in Hawaii. When Piano Soloist would come to Honolulu to perform with the Honolulu Symphony they would all come to Thayer Piano to use the Steinways. This gave Albert the opportunity to meet a number of concert pianists including Van Cliburn.
He spent the rest of his life in Hawaii until his death on July 2, 2014 in Ewa beach, Hawaii.
Through his whole life, none of his orchestral compositions were played except for a tango and a piece for full chorus, “Tango d’Amor”, performed in the summer of 1988 by the Tifereth Israel Community of Orchestra (formerly San Diego Jewish Community Orchestra) www.tiferethisrael.com conducted by David Amos and a piece arranged for full choir “God Gave Us Christmas” performed in 1982 by Kamehameha School Choir.
ALBERT C. JOHNSTON JR. THE UNKNOWN AMERICAN COMPOSER