Graeme Steele Johnson

Graeme Steele Johnson, clarinet (Plano, TX), has established a multifaceted career as a clarinetist, composer, and arranger. His diverse artistic endeavors range from a TEDx talk comparing Mozart and “Seinfeld”, to his reconstruction of a forgotten 125-year-old work by Charles Martin Loeffler, to performances of Mozart’s Clarinet Concertoon an elongated clarinet that he commissioned. Winner of the Hellam Young Artists’ Competition, Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition and the inaugural CME Lee Memorial Scholarship, Graeme has appeared in recital at The Kennedy Center and Chicago’s Dame Myra Hess series, and as a chamber musician at Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Northwest, Phoenix Chamber Music Festival and the Ravinia Festival. His concerto appearances include the Vienna International Orchestra, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Caroga Lake and Vermont Mozart Festival Orchestras and the CME Chamber Orchestra, with an upcoming performance and recording with Ukraine’s Lviv Philharmonic. Graeme has authored numerous chamber arrangements of repertoire from Mozart to Messiaen, and has performed them around the country with such artists as Valerie Coleman, the Miró Quartet and Hannah Lash. He studied with David Shifrin at the Yale School of Music and is now a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center under the mentorship of Charles Neidich.