Composer David Clark
(born New York City, April 19, 1960)
Composer David Clark
A native New Yorker, David Clark was a theatrical and musical prodigy. He wrote a symphony at fifteen years of age, Spring Things, that was performed at the State Capitol in Albany in 1976. While still a teenager, Mr. Clark also studied jazz bass with Rufus Reid, sang roles in five musical productions, was a NY All-State Chorus member, studied electronic synthesis at the NY State Summer School for the Arts at SUNY Buffalo, and studied music theory at Western Connecticut State College. As an undergraduate, he studied composition with Donald Bohlen and Walter S. Hartley at SUNY Fredonia. He won the school’s “Ethos” Composition Contest in 1981, graduated in only three years, and stayed on as a graduate assistant. Mr. Clark received a scholarship to begin graduate studies in music at Yale University, but in lieu of further study, chose to “see the world.” He left New Haven for Texas and toured the U.S. with a show band out of Dallas as a multi-instrumentalist and singer for several years before deciding to settle in Atlanta, where he has enjoyed a successful career as an attorney.
Mr. Clark won the Atlanta Songwriters’ Association songwriting contest (gospel category), with his song “Holy”, published by SONY/Tree in 1997. His contemporary church service, Morning Star has been in use every week in the Atlanta area since 1994. David and his wife have firmly settled in to Atlanta; his work as music director of his Lutheran church led him to write and record an original album of contemporary worship songs with the vocal group “Voices on the Wind,” which performed his music at Turner Field in 1998, including his gospel arrangement of the national anthem to start the game. He wrote a series of over 30 humorous essays for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Gwinnett Section) as a community columnist from 1997-1999. In 2011, he took up the musical pen seriously once again after writing a cello concerto (“Apollo and Daphne”) for his seventeen-year old daughter as a gift. In 2012, dissatisfied with the concerto, he returned to music school to study composition with Nikitas Demos and Robert Scott Thompson at Georgia State University. Since returning to serious concert music he has written a piece for mixed Chinese-Western orchestra (“Pages d’Album”), several pieces for symphonic winds, (including “All Hail the Glow Cloud” in 2014), and over two dozen chamber pieces, including a quartet, “Threnody to the Victims of Freedom” that was selected for performance at the 2012 Society of Composers, Inc. Student National Conference in Columbus OH. Over the summer of 2014, he composed pieces for Ictus Percussion of New York, and Freya Quartet of Pittsburgh while in attendance at the Charlotte New Music Festival.
David Clark’s goal is to inspire people with original music. His style is evolving into a personal voice informed by Spectralism, serialism, and post-modernism. Influences include Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Anton Webern.
“Good music is three things: meaningful, engaging and sophisticated. I take emotional risks in my music in a sincere effort to communicate my passion for living.”
