Education
- PhD, University of British Columbia
- MA, University of British Columbia
- BMus, University of Calgary
Biography
Gregory Johnston is Professor of Musicology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include music of the late Renaissance and Baroque generally, and are focused more topically on sacred music in Protestant Germany, music performance and historical perception, social contexts and ceremonial practices of occasional music, the social role of civic and court musicians in early modern Europe.
His work has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Early Music, Schütz-Jahrbuch, The Canadian University Music Review, Music and Letters, MLA Notes, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Current Musicology, and Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, in addition to numerous published conference proceedings in English and German. Recent publications include A Heinrich Schütz Reader: Letters and Documents in Translation (Oxford University Press, 2013; pbk 2016), and a critical performance edition of Wolfgang Carl Briegel’s Zwölff Madrigalische Trost-Gesänge (1670/71), published in 2016 by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music.
Current projects include a monograph study of Heinrich Schütz’s Musicalische Exequien in the context of funerary practices of the German Baroque, an inquiry into the professional and interdependent financial relationship between musicians and the court in seventeenth-century Dresden, and an investigation of the effects of economic crisis on individual livelihoods and the arts in early modern Europe. Future publications include articles on Oratorio, Dialogue and the Musicalische Exequien for a Schütz-Handbuch, as well as two newly edited volumes (2 & 3) for the Neue Schütz-Ausgabe, all of which are expected to appear with Bärenreiter-Verlag in 2018.
His research has been supported through fellowships at the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel, Germany) and by repeated grants from each of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, (DAAD) and the Government of Lower Saxony (Germany). Prior to his appointment to the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto in 1991, Johnston taught at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. He is Chair of the North American chapter of the Internationale Heinrich-Schütz-Gesellschaft and serves on the Governing Board of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.