Clayton Johns

Johns, Clayton (24 Nov. 1857-5 Mar. 1932), composer, pianist, and teacher, was born in New Castle, Delaware, the son of James McCalmont Johns and Eliza Hopkins. Clayton received his early education at public and private schools in Delaware, including Rugby Academy in Wilmington. While his tradition-bound family envisioned for him a career in law or the clergy, he wished to pursue music. He compromised by studying architecture in Philadelphia (c. 1875-1879). He then moved to Boston to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but after hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, decided on music after all. He studied composition at Harvard University with John Knowles Paine (1879-1881) and also studied piano privately with William H. Sherwood in 1879-1882.

In 1882 Johns went to England, where he and various traveling companions got "our first thrill of antiquity" (Reminiscences of a Musician, p. 11), moved on to Wagner's Bayreuth Festival for a performance of Parsifal, and then to Berlin, where he studied piano with Friedrich Grabau and Oskar Raif and counterpoint and composition with Friedrich Kiel, all three members of the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik. In July 1883 he briefly attended Franz Liszt's master class in Weimar. He also became friendly with the great violinist Joseph Joachim. In June 1884 he returned to Boston, establishing himself as a teacher of piano and composition, and publishing many of his songs and other works.

For twenty years he gave an annual recital featuring his latest songs, and he spent many summers in Europe, especially England, with old and new acquaintances. In the summer of 1895 he spent six weeks in London accompanying Nellie Melba, Emma Eames, David Bispham, and others as they performed his songs. Other singers who sang his songs during the course of his life included Julie Wyman, Marie Brema, Eliot Hubbard, Max Heinrich, John S. Codman, and Heinrich Meyn. His most loyal collaborator was the Boston soprano Lena Little. He confessed in Reminiscences that he "never got over a temperamental nervousness" in front of audiences but did enjoy playing chamber music. A notable series of performances in the 1880s, surveying the sonata literature for piano and violin with composer-violinist Charles Martin Loeffler, was held in the downtown Boston home of his friends John L. and Isabella Stewart Gardner. He taught piano at the New England Conservatory from 1912 to 1928.

Johns never married and judging from hints in his memoirs and in obituaries, may have been homosexual. "His home was in Brimmer Chambers, at Pinckney Street [an area popular with homosexuals] and the Esplanade," according to the obituary in the Conservatory Bulletin. He was a member of the Tavern Club (along with many other prominent musicians) and the Harvard Club and frequented the Church of the Advent. He died in Boston.

Johns's musical works include Introduction and Fugue for piano (1899), played by Josef Hoffmann; short pieces for violin and piano, for piano solo, and for string orchestra; and The Mystery Play, incidental music for a fourteenth-century miracle play performed at the Tavern Club in 1905. Of his more than 100 songs for solo voice and piano, many were published in sets (e.g., Wonder Songs [1895] and French Songs [1898]), some of them printed with unusual care for elegance and accuracy. Hughes and Elson reported that though several piano works held "well-earned popularity . . . his songs carry farthest with the public. One has yet to hear of a summer hotel in this broad country that has not echoed to 'I Cannot Help Loving Thee,' or 'I Love, And The World Is Mine' " (Hughes and Elson, pp. 551-52). Other Johns songs particularly appreciated in his lifetime were "The Scythe Song," "Were I a Prince Egyptian," "No Lotos Flower on Ganges Borne," and "Barefoot Boy with Cheek of Tan" (the latter was included in songbooks for use in public schools).

The songs are little heard today, but the best of them deserve revival for their melodiousness, grateful keyboard writing, and sensitivity to the well-chosen texts (e.g., by Arlo Bates, Emily Dickinson, Oliver Herford, Robert Herrick, Andrew Lang, and Paul Verlaine). "While he is not at all revolutionary, he has a certain individuality of ease, and lyric quality without storm or stress of passion" (Hughes and Elson, p. 368).

Johns published three books, in addition to his travel-oriented Reminiscences of a Musician (1929), which includes eleven photographs. The Essentials of Pianoforte-Playing (1909) is notable for enriching the usual technical instruction with historical and music-theoretical guidelines to help the performer grasp the style and characteristic gestures of the various pieces (complete movements) reprinted and discussed. From Bach to Chopin (1911) prints passages from standard-repertoire works, with helpful commentary about how to play them with facility and musical sensitivity. Do You Know That------? (1926), was dedicated to the faculty and students of the New England Conservatory of Music and offers further words of wisdom and pet theories about musical style, form, performance, and aesthetics, including fascinating analogies between sonata form and both drama and architecture. For example, Johns views first theme, second theme, and confirmation of the new key as being like, respectively, the hero, heroine, and "other male character" in a play. Such hermeneutic tools, however simplistic in wording, are of interest to current musical scholarship for what they reveal about how gendered and other social meanings are encoded, or were once believed to be so, in the music itself.

Bibliography

Letters from Johns to Isabella Stewart Gardner are in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Excerpts are cited and discussed in Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack (1965), which also contains a photograph of Johns with mustache; and in Ralph P. Locke, "Isabella Stewart Gardner: Music Patron and Music Lover," in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860, ed. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (1997), pp. 90-121. The manuscript of The Mystery Play is in the New York Public Library. Johns's Do You Know That------? is discussed in Locke, "Comment and Chronicle [on Sonata Form]," Nineteenth-Century Music 16, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 304-5. Rupert Hughes and Arthur Elson's American Composers (1914), offers an evaluation of Johns's compositions. On the world of Pinckney Street, with discussions of Johns and various of his friends, see Douglas Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900, vol. 1 of Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (1994). Obituaries are in the Boston Evening Transcript, 5 Mar. 1932; the New York Times, 6 Mar. 1932; Musical Courier 12 Mar. 1932; and the New England Conservatory of Music Bulletin 14, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 304-5.

Ralph P. Locke

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