Kate Johnson’s life has been shaped by two seemingly incongruous passions: music and cycling. She has been a clarinetist with the Royal Hawaiian Band for 25 years, first as a part-timer, then earning a full-time chair in 2024. Cycling also brings her pleasure and fulfillment. She has finished numerous races in Hawai‘i and on the continent, including Kona’s Ironman World Championship in 2015, which includes a 112-mile biking leg.
Johnson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Fullerton, Southern California, the youngest of five children. She started playing the clarinet in the fourth grade, developing what her band directors and clarinet instructors saw as exceptional musical talent over the years.
While attending California State University, Long Beach (Long Beach State), Johnson was active in the school’s choir and orchestra. For many years, famed alumni Richard and Karen Carpenter—the Grammy Award-winning 1970s duo, The Carpenters—headlined the Winter Festival concerts on campus.
“Karen passed away in 1983, the year before I enrolled at Long Beach State, but for the four years I was there, I had the incredible opportunity of performing in the concerts with Richard, both as a clarinetist and a vocalist,” Johnson said. “He augmented his band with student musicians and always featured the choir in his songs.”
During her junior year in the spring of 1987, Johnson sent an audition tape to Robert Marcellus, then professor of clarinet at Northwestern University, hoping he would accept her as a student. Impressed, Marcellus, who had been the principal clarinetist for the renowned Cleveland Orchestra for 20 years, responded with an unusual but enticing proposal: If Johnson could come to Door County, Wisconsin, where he spent summers, he would teach her. His wife, he said, could help her find a part-time job and a place to stay.
Two months later, Johnson and her dad were in her Mazda pickup truck, driving to Door County. For nine weeks, she lived with a family that had two young girls and worked at a gourmet wine and cheese shop in Sister Bay, about eight miles away, to pay for her room and board and private weekly lessons with Marcellus. At the time, he was charging $100 per lesson, which lasted from one to three hours. That was a lot of money for a college student, but, for Johnson, a big bonus was meeting his friends—prominent flutists, harpists and pianists—who were regulars at the shop.
“Mr. Marcellus was a taskmaster, but I learned so much about the art of playing music from him,” Johnson said. “To say he left a profound imprint on my life is an understatement. I remember him telling me, ‘When you think you have given 100% into playing the music, you’ve really given only about 60%. You have more in reserve. Dig deeper.’”
It’s advice Johnson also found invaluable as an athlete. In 1985, she had been introduced to cycling by a college boyfriend who was training for the Race Across America. At the time, that grueling June bike competition went 3,000 miles from Huntington Beach, California, to Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“He bought me my first road bike, and I was hooked,” Johnson said. “We primarily rode in the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, about 20 miles north of Los Angeles, with others who were training for the race, so the rides were strenuous, and I was expected to keep up with them. I loved the freedom I felt on the bike—moving forward under my own power, feeling the sun and wind on my face. Riding to the point of exhaustion was exhilarating! I wound up dumping the guy and keeping the bike.”
Johnson married in 1989, the year after she graduated from Long Beach State with a major in clarinet performance and a minor in choral vocal technique. In 1990, her husband, Loren, an Army intelligence officer, received a five-year duty assignment to Germany, where they were stationed in Grafenwöhr and Augsburg in Bavaria.
There, Johnson bonded with the local and military communities through music. Among other things, she directed the bases’ chapel choirs; was the principal clarinetist for the Weiden Symphony Orchestra; joined a jügend blaskapelle, a band specializing in German folk music; and founded and conducted two 75-member choirs comprising German and American soldiers and civilians.
Back in the U.S. in 1995, Johnson resumed cycling in earnest. She participated in triathlons from 1998 to 2016, ultimately deciding to step away from that to focus on coaching cyclists, which she had started to do in 2007 for Boca Hawai‘i. She continued coaching in person in Hawai‘i and online for clients on the continent until the end of last year.
“Giving up coaching was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make,” Johnson said. “It was a privilege to accompany athletes on their journey, some of them going from never ever having ridden a bike to, within three years, finishing their first Ironman triathlon. Both jobs—coaching and being in the Royal Hawaiian Band—are time and energy intensive. The band has become the higher calling for me.”
In her spare time, Johnson is researching the band’s history and organizing its photos, records and news clips. Tuesday mornings, she volunteers at the Hawai‘i State Archives. Her current project is helping to digitize the vast record album collection that belonged to composer and bandleader Harry Owens, who’s known for establishing the hapa haole style of Hawaiian music.
For fitness and recreation, Johnson cycles about 60 miles per week around the Royal Hawaiian Band’s busy performance schedule. “For me, going to retirement homes is especially rewarding,” she said. “We might play Chinese or Japanese folk songs, and the kūpuna’s eyes light up as they sing the lyrics in their native language. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve seen how music brings people joy, touches their hearts and souls. Music bridges gaps. It connects us as human beings. The band is such an important part of Hawai‘i’s history. How amazing is it that Ke Akua has allowed me to be a very small part of it?”
