David P. DeVenney has established a wide reputation as a conductor and scholar. His choirs have toured throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, receiving acclaim for their carefully prepared and musically exciting performances from audiences and critics alike. The WCU Concert Choir has sung to sold-out audiences in venues like St. Severin in Paris, and was invited to close the prestigious Viareggio, Italy Choral Festival in 2004. His conducting repertory includes over one hundred major choral works with orchestra and two dozen operas and musicals, and he has commissioned and premiered new choral works by noteworthy composers such as David Conte, Robert Maggio, Jennifer Higdon, Emma Lou Diemer, Marvin Hamlisch, and Robert Page. His choirs appear commercially on the Albany label as well as on several private CDs with his university ensembles, and have appeared at state and regional conferences of the Ohio Choral Directors Association and the College Music Society. Dr. DeVenney regularly collaborates with professional ensembles, conducting the Reading Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Classical Symphony, the Brandywine Ballet, and others. He received the 2003 Dean’s Award for Artistic Excellence from West Chester University and the 2006 Distinguished Music Alumnus award from Iowa State University, and has several times been named Outstanding Teacher by the WCU Honors College.
        Dr. DeVenney holds degrees in conducting from Iowa State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He is professor of music at West Chester University, where he directs the select Concert Choir and the Men’s Chorus and guides the graduate program in choral studies. For over a decade, he was music director of the Reading Choral Society, a highly regarded community chorus and one of America’s oldest musical ensembles. Under his leadership, the Society pursued a much expanded repertory and greatly increased its educational programs. He founded and for seven seasons served as music director of VocalBaroque, a professional chamber choir in Columbus, Ohio. He has held faculty appointments at Otterbein College, the University of Arizona, and Virginia Tech.

        Dr. DeVenney has made substantive contributions to scholarship in American choral music through his fourteen books and dozens of articles. In addition to a five-volume annotated bibliographic guide to American choral music, he has written the first historical survey of this important repertory, as well as books on opera, musical theatre, and cultural studies. The Choral Journal called him “one of the most industrious scholars on the current scene,” while MLA Notes labeled his contributions to the study of American choral music “an impressive achievement." For fifteen years, he was General Editor of the Research Memorandum Series published by Chorus America. His many arrangements of American folk songs have been performed throughout the United States and have begun to be published; his critical edition of John Knowles Paine's Mass in D, an important nineteenth-century American masterwork, will soon be issued; and his three-volume conducting textbook series Conducting Choirs has recently been published by Roger Dean Publishing.

    
 

(Vaughan Williams's Dona nobis pacem,
WCU Choirs and Symphony Orchestra)