TJ Instrumental Music Teacher Robin Johnson knows how to keep her program in tune.
photo by Rebecca Holt
Music runs through Robin Johnson’s veins. She was born in Missouri, and while she moved around a lot, music was an important part of Johnson’s household, and at the age of five she too began to plunk the ivory keys (with a little nudge from her mother, of course). The piano seemed to satisfy, until one fateful day when a high school band visited her elementary school, and she became fascinated with the clarinet. “I remember seeing a kid playing with a big black tube with shiny buttons on it and thinking, ‘Ooh! That looks fun!’” Johnson laughs. And with that clarinet, history was made.
Picking up the instrument in the fifth grade, Johnson kept with it all the way into college. In high school, she juggled private lessons with advanced classes, the swim team, and the synchronized swim team, and even made it onto the All State Honor Band. “I went to four different high schools because my parents moved a lot,” she explained. “But everywhere I went I had a great band teacher. They were all great, and (band class) was my favorite class at every school.”
It was her great teachers who inspired Johnson to look to music as a career, but it was not what her family had expected from her. “Math and numbers always came easily to me, and my parents had expected me to go into engineering. So when I announced that I was going to college for music, it was a bit of a shock. But, somehow, I just felt like that’s where I wanted to be.”
Johnson’s first job after her college years at the University of Northern Colorado was in Crowley County, where she taught the middle school band, high school choir, and eighth grade Spanish. “Yes, Spanish. It was my minor,” Johnson laughs. After working in Crowley, Johnson taught band and orchestra at Hamilton Middle School in Denver from 1988-1991. Following her time there, she decided that raising a family was more important than teaching at Hamilton, so she hung up her baton.
Yet all hope was not lost, for in 2006, after the previous orchestra director quit halfway through the year, Johnson began to conduct once more to take over until the school found a replacement. The TJ school administrators, however, convinced her to sign on as the permanent instrumental music teacher, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“I love teaching the band and the orchestra; they both have grown a lot over the past couple of years,” said Johnson. “The orchestra has progressed to the level where we’re past learning where to put our fingers and what’s in tune, but where we can actually make music. The band has gone from ground zero and has improved drastically, and it’s fun watching the whole group grow.”
And grow the program has. Johnson, and the instrumental music program, sent over ten performers to the Citywide Honors Band and Orchestra in November. “I’m really proud that we sent so many people to Citywide,” said Johnson. Recently, the orchestra has been performing for the public and fund-raising, playing for the grand opening of the Census Bureau and the Commercial Real Estate Women (or CREW) Denver group, while some of the band marched in the Parade of Lights.
Johnson has high hopes for the program. “I hope to take the orchestra to a large ensemble festival, as well as a small ensemble festival in April. I also hope to see a marching band, a jazz band, and beginning as well as advanced classes,” she explains. The program has also grown considerably with the students.
“(Johnson) works really hard,” says TJ Violinist Akaxia Cruz. “She’s caring and supportive; she really cares about the students and their goals.”
Violist Ivanna Vdovich feels the same. “(Johnson) is really dedicated, and pushes us out of our comfort zones and challenges us.”
Johnson is incredibly proud of her students, not just for making music, but also for making a difference. “The kids are taking the initiative and making the program their own. They say, ‘This is our orchestra, this is our band, this is our program,’ and I’m really proud of that.”
