David Johnson

David Charles Johnson is a Scottish composer and a scholar of 18th century Scottish music. Dr David Johnson was ‘an internationally recognised scholar’, whose work did much to rediscover and reinvent 18th century Scottish music, and set it in its historical context. Johnson’s key legacy is to leave behind a body of writing and editions which throws light on the music and wider social life of 18th century lowland Scotland, its influences and tastes, and the key musical figures within it.

Johnson was born in Edinburgh in October 1962, the eldest of three sons. His father, Sir Ronald Johnson, was a senior civil servant at the Scottish Home and Health Department and organist of the episcopal church of St. Columba’s-By-the-Castle. His mother, Lady Elizabeth, was the Director of the Holst Singers (of Edinburgh) and was organist at Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian.

Johnson was educated at the Steiner School in Edinburgh, and was musical from a young age, playing recorder, piano and cello, and composing a wide range of pieces for different instruments and having work published while still a school boy. He studied English at Aberdeen University. He then moved to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he achieved a First in music.

At St. John’s College, Cambridge he completed a Doctoral Thesis under musicologist Charles Cudworth, which led to a 1972 book Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the 18th Century.This remains a seminal work in its field and ‘brought to light the synergy between ‘folk’ and ‘art’ music which existed in Baroque and Classical music of Scotland’. The book also examined music’s position in 18th century Scottish society, and the work of Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie, a