A. N. Johnson, Out of Oblivion

A. N. Johnson was famous in his own day-the teacher of George F. Root and Theodore Presser; the founder of several conservatories of music; the composer of hundreds of hymn tunes and anthems; the compiler of music books for common schools, church choirs, and singing schools; the writer of books on music theory and choral methodology; the editor of music periodicals; and an indefatigable conductor of musical conventions, normals, and institutes held in various parts of the United States. Yet Johnson-who had even been a student, colleague, and finally an antagonist to Lowell Mason, as well as a star pupil of Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee-does not appear in any general history of American music and is merely listed by both Birge and Keene without further comment as one of many individuals first employed by Mason as a teacher of music in the Boston public schools.1 In his time, Johnson came to be deliberately ignored by most members of the American musical establishment. Some of the reasons are understandable, some are not. But despite this extreme prejudicial treatment, Johnson was a major contributor to America's musical development. This extraordinary man, whose career extended over a half century, was born Artemus Nixon Johnson in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1817. However, he was known as A. N. Johnson from the onset of his professional career, a career for which he had laid the groundwork in his mid-teens when he became a church organist in Boston, where he then lived. After graduating from the city's public high school, he worked as a clerk in a large hardware store, a profession that suggests he had taken the school's merchant course rather than the alternative mechanic course. By age twenty-one he abandoned this secure position to concentrate his energies on the development of a musical career. He soon became an assistant to Lowell Mason, serving in 1840 as organist at Park Street Church, where Mason, the most famous music educator and hymn-tune writer

Art · Art history · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis

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• Revisionist Historians

  Open Access•Carol A Pemberton•Journal of Research in Music…•1987

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