Interview with David Conte

Nearly half of the members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus died at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. David Conte's Invocation and Dance was written for that chorus in 1986.

David Conte is a multiple prize-winning and much recorded composer who is chair of composition at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In this interview, he speaks about his compositional journey from Ohio to Paris where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, his interactions with Shanghai Conservatory, the sizable presence of Chinese students in US conservatories, and his take on global musics. We spoke on a number of other topics and discussed several of his works, including his Invocation and Dance. The text, drawn from Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” ruminates on death as part of nature. The first movement, Invocation, uses text that is enunciated as a bird song within the poem. As the poem detaches from the scene of human activity, the figure of the bird emerges as a solitary figure that merges with vast nature, in a poem ruminating on the cycle of death and life. David’s moving music creates a moment of mourning and healing in the midst of tragedy, as choral voices vibrate like the sound of nature.

Works discussed: Fantasy for Orchestra (2003), Invocation and Dance (1989; SATB), September Sun (2002), The Gift of the Magi (1997), and American Death Ballads (2015; tenor, piano).