Dr. David Stern is an award winning composer and music theorist. He holds a Ph.D. in music theory from The Graduate Center of CUNY and has taught music theory at various colleges including Queens College, CUNY, The Mannes College of Music, Ball State University, University of North Texas and Claremont Colleges. He has worked for major clients in the Los Angeles music world, including The Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has had orchestral compositions performed around the United States. He specializes in composing in a neo-tonal style that synthesizes aspects of traditional harmony and form with more contemporary elements. This attractive style aims to be spiritually uplifting and speaks readily to performers and audiences. 

Dr. Stern has won the composition competition hosted by the Tehachapi Symphony Orchestra on two occasions. The first was with the spiritually themed tone poem for chamber orchestra The Golden Thread (premiered 2018) and more recently with the nature-inspired tone poem The San Gabriel Mountains (premiered 2023). His work for narrator and orchestra, Lincoln Speaks of Liberty uses inspired texts by Lincoln and was premiered in 2018 by The Muscatine Symphony Orchestra conducted by Brian Dollinger, with world-class Lincoln reenactor Fritz Klein playing the role of Lincoln, and subsequently by the Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra conducted by David Amos with San Diego TV personality Dave Scott narrating the Lincoln texts. Two orchestral works, Da Vinci’s Wings of Flight and Da Vinci’s Musical Riddle were premiered by The New Haven Symphony in 2006. We Stand for Freedom: In Memoriam, September 11th, 2001 has already received several performances around the U.S. Thoreau Contemplates Eternity at Walden Pond has been performed at Ball State University, by The Muscatine Symphony Orchestra, and by The Utah Philharmonia.

Selected texts for musical setting for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass 

(more texts will be chosen for this project)

 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?

Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

I know I am solid and sound,

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

I know I am deathless,

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,

I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

I know I am august,

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,

And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,

The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,

(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.