Organist, harpist, conductor, composer – Gordon Johnston is a musical homme à tout faire. For 37 years he was organist and choirmaster at St John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. For much of that time, he was also Director of Music in the Anglican Studies Programme at Saint Paul University, where he taught music to students preparing for ordination. (From that experience, he learned that after students are ordained, they’ll do whatever they please, which may or may not reflect what you taught them; so if your priest has an unusual attitude toward music, don’t blame their seminary, we did the best we could.)

A native of Calgary, Alberta, Gordon studied organ and choral conducting at Brigham Young University (Utah), subsequently studying organ with the famous Bach specialist Bernard Lagacé. He holds the degree of Doctor of Sacred Music summa cum laude from the Graduate Theological Foundation. He is the founding conductor of the Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus, and was for many years the conductor of the Strings of St John’s chamber orchestra. Yet despite all these snooty qualifications, he is totally devoted to using music as a tool to bring out the joy in people, to breathe and sing together with passion and purpose. He has been involved with the paperless music movement for many years, and now retired from snooty-music-making, looks forward to pouring his musical and personal passion into making music with MMC.