Scherzo Grosso 8.1.08

David W. Sanford b. 1963, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Called an artist “leading modern serious music into the 21st century”, and “a refreshing view of the great writing and composition that [eludes] us in our high-tech, post-modern, perfunctory, ‘paint-by-the-numbers’ world”, David Sanford composes across many genres for a vast range of ensembles and musicians, and leads the equally versatile Pittsburgh Collective, a contemporary big band. Audiences have heard his works in venues as diverse as Lincoln Center, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, CBGB’s in New York, the Villa Aurelia in Rome, Tanglewood, Sanders Theatre at Harvard, and the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. Recent highlights include a Composer Portrait concert of his works at Miller Theatre in New York, performances by the Pittsburgh Collective at the 2006 Festival of New Trumpet Music and the 2007 International Association of Jazz Educators Conference in New York, and the release the CD Live at the Knitting Factory (Oxingale) with the Pittsburgh Collective featuring cellist Matt Haimovitz, which topped Jazziz writer Alexander Helfand’s “Critic’s Choices” for 2007. Upcoming works include a work for Duo d’Amore and a concerto grosso for Speculum Musicae with big band.

Sanford has also been commissioned by the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Empyrean Ensemble at the University of California at Davis, the Princeton University Chapel Choir, cellists Haimovitz and Andre Emilianoff, violist Amadi Hummings, trombonist Benjamin Herrington, and flutists Marya Martin and Adrianne Greenbaum, with funding from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Koussevitzky Foundation, Meet the Composer, and Concert Artists Guild. In addition his performances include concerts by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra with Kent Nagano, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Fargo/Moorhead Symphony, the Harlem Festival Orchestra, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, the Seventh Chapter Brass (Australia), Il Suono Sacro, the University of Iowa New Music Ensemble, the Duquesne University Contemporary Ensemble, jazz musicians George Garzone, Bob Mintzer, Pheeroan ak’Laff, Ed Peterson, Bob Gullotti, Chris Washburne, Nelson Harrison, and the Corvini e Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble, participation in the Wellesley Composers Conference and the African American Composers Forum, and conducting his own works at Monadnock Music, the American Academy in Rome, New England Conservatory (alumni composers concert), and Skidmore College. His recorded works include Chamber Concerto No. 3 performed by Speculum Musicae under William Purvis (CRI), Seventh Avenue Kaddish played by Matt Haimovitz (on ANTHEM, Oxingale), and Corpus by the Meridian Arts Ensemble (on Brink, Channel Classics).

David Sanford was born in Pittsburgh, PA into a musical family: his great-grandmother Mozie Bass-Grant composed songs and music for church pageants, his maternal grandfather William A. Jones was the choirmaster at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, PA, his paternal grandfather Joseph Sanford was a jazz trumpeter in Birmingham, AL, his mother Nancy Thomann (nee Jones) was an organist and choir director at several churches in Pittsburgh and Colorado Springs, his father Joseph Sanford Jr. was a singer and worked for years as an organizer for the annual University of Pittsburgh Jazz Seminar, and his brother Joseph III sings professionally and teaches music in the Denver area public schools. Sanford began studying the trombone at age ten and his family moved to Colorado Springs the following year. His first compositions and arrangements were for his junior high school jazz ensemble, and he would continue to arrange and transcribe pieces for his high school marching band (1981 Colorado State AAA Champions). At the University of Northern Colorado he studied music theory and composition (privately with Richard Bourassa, Robert Ehle, Mary Rhodes and R. Evan Copley), also taking private lessons in trombone, piano, and voice, and classroom study in jazz theory and arranging. Along with several performances of big band and marching band arrangements, several students and faculty programmed his chamber and solo compositions on their recitals. As a sophomore he won the school’s Dale Dykins Award for composition, and conducted his first performance of a big band in his own arrangement, The Bullwinkle and Rocky Suite.

After graduating Northern Colorado with the Bachelor of Music, Sanford attended the New England Conservatory where he received the Master of Music degree in composition studying with Arthur Berger, and later the Masters in theory working with Pozzi Escot and completing a thesis on Webern’s Cantata No. 2. His Woodwind Quintet No. 2, written while studying with Berger, received a performance by the Conservatory’s Honors Woodwind Quintet, and a year later a BMI Student Composition Award. Sanford received a fellowship for further graduate study at Princeton University, and received the Ph.D. in Theory and Composition for his dissertation “Prelude (Part I)” from Agharta: Primitivism and modernism in the fusion works of Miles Davis, studying privately with Steve Mackey, Claudio Spies and James K. Randall. His MFA thesis was a comparison of two transcriptions each of Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. His dissertation piece, Russo/Argo/Russo, featuring Randall and fellow graduate student Elliot Handelman in speaking roles, was recorded on the school’s first CD of student compositions DRCD.

Upon completion of his doctorate, Sanford began teaching at Mount Holyoke College, where he is currently Associate Professor of Music and received one of the school’s two annual Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Awards for Scholarship. His courses have included composition, intermediate and advanced theory, jazz history, 20th century music history, music of the 1970s, and music and film. While at Princeton he was a student teacher leading precepts in theory, counterpoint, and jazz history. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and a Visiting Professor at Amherst College.

For his first sabbatical in 2002-03 Sanford received the Rome Prize, during which time he completed six big band works and formed the Pittsburgh Collective, whose first performances were in September of 2003. His additional honors include the Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the New Jersey Arts Council/Department of State, an ASCAP Grant to Young Composers, a reading of his Double Concerto for Trombone, Bass Trombone and Wind Ensemble by the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble through the American Music Center, Composer-in-Residence at the San Juan Islands Chamber Music Festival through Concert Artists Guild, and First Prize in the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Composition Contest for wind ensemble.

As a performer, David Sanford played in the University of Northern Colorado jazz bands, concert bands, and the trombone choir, and sang with the concert choir and the Grammy Award-nominated Vocal Jazz I. During his time in Boston he sang with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, whose 1986 performances with the Boston Symphony included the premier of Donald Martino’s The White Island, and the American premier of three Tableaux from Messiaen’s St. Francois de Assise. As a member of Princeton University’s Chapel Choir, he sang baritone and bass solos in the Requiems of Brahms and Faure, Handel’s Messiah, and Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. John Passion. Since joining the faculty at Mount Holyoke, he has played trombone and percussion with the school’s jazz ensembles and orchestras.

His works are published by Theodore Presser and Blue Bison Music, and he currently lives in Northampton, MA with his wife, architect Mary Yun, and their two children.