Cleveland Johnson

Cleveland Thomas Johnson (born November 3, 1955) is an American academic, administrator, music historian, and early-music performer. He has been the director of the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota since 2012. Previously, he was Executive Director of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (2008-2012, New York, New York), Dean of the School of Music at DePauw University (2006-2008, Greencastle, Indiana), Professor of Music at DePauw University (1985-2012), and Music Librarian at Old Dominion University (1983-1985; Norfolk, Virginia). DePauw University awarded him the title, Professor Emeritus of Music, in 2012.

Johnson received the B.Mus. degree in 1977 with majors in Music History and Organ Performance from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, where he studied organ with Fenner Douglas and William Porter. With a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, he studied historic performance practice from 1977-1978 at the Nordeutsche Orgelakademie (Bunderhee, Germany) with Harald Vogel and Klaas Bolt on the historic pipe organs of East Frisia (Germany) and the Province Groningen (Netherlands). Early in his career, he introduced English-speaking scholars to the potential research value of historic organs in Ostfriesland (East Frisia) in the journal, Early Music. Much later, he covered this topic for The Organ: An Encyclopedia. On the occasion of Harald Vogel’s 65th birthday, Johnson compiled a Festschrift in his honor, Orphei Organi Antiqui. Essays in Honor of Harald Vogel, containing research by Bolt, Porter, and many former Vogel students and colleagues.

To remain in close proximity to the sources of his academic research and performance, focused primarily on the organ culture of northern Europe, Johnson remained in Europe and was enrolled at Oxford University (Christ Church College) from 1978—studying with Denis Arnold, Anthony Baines, John Caldwell, Simon Preston, and Alan Tyson, receiving the Doctor of Philosophy in Music in 1984, with a dissertation on 16th- and 17th-century organ tablatures.

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