Professional and Biographical Information

Degrees

Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1997
M.A., University of California at Berkeley, 1990
A.B., Harvard College 1985

Research Interests

Béla Bartók, Ferenc Erkel, and Hungarian music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the history of the concerto from Mozart to John Adams; Opera; Chamber Music Analysis and Performance

Research

My first research area was on nineteenth-century traditions of Hungarian art music and their influence on the development of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s modern style. More recently I have been working on concertos and Viennese operetta.

Teaching Interests

Music history, Opera, Music Theory and Analysis, Music Performance, Musicianship, Music Criticism

Books

The Concerto: Common Concerns, and Critical Conversations from Mozart to John Adams.  A collection of critical essays on works for solo instrument and orchestra. (In preparation)

Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

With Klára Móricz:
Oxford Anthology of Western Music: The Mid-Eighteenth Century to the Late Nineteenth Century, v. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; 2nd edition, 2018.

Oxford Anthology of Western Music: The Twentieth Century, v. 3. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 2nd edition, 2018.

Recordings

The Buckley Chamber Players: Music of Salvatore Macchia, Daniel Palkowski, Eric Sawyer, Lewis Spratlan. Chamber music written for and performed by David Schneider, clarinet. Albany, NY: Albany Records (Troy1467), 2014.

Clarinet Concerto by Aaron Copland with The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, David Schneider, clarinet, James Yannatos, conductor. Cambridge: AFKA Records, 1988.

Academic Biography

David E. Schneider is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music at Amherst College, where he has taught music history, theory, and chamber music since 1997. His scholarly work has focused on the Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Ferenc Erkel, as well the music of Anton Webern and the genre of the concerto. In addition to his book Béla Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition (University of California Press, 2006), he has published articles, translations, and reviews in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Letters, Studia MusicologicaThe New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Bartók and His WorldThe Cambridge Companion to Bartók, The Cambridge Companion to the ConcertoMagyar Zene,Musik Theorie, and the complete critical edition of Ferenc Erkel’s operas. With Klára Móricz he is the editor of two volumes of anthologies to accompany Richard Taruskin and Christopher Gibbs’s Oxford History of Western Music College Edition. A frequent public speaker on music, he is the pre-concert lecturer and program annotator of the Pioneer Valley Symphony in Western Massachusetts. A professional clarinetist until 2012, he had a number of works written for him over the years. A selection of these works, including Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis Spratlan’s Trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, can be heard on Schneider’s recording The Buckley Chamber Players (Albany Records, Troy1467). He is currently working on a collection of critical essays on the concerto from Mozart to John Adams.