David Hoose
Music Director Emeritus

David Hoose became Music Director of Cantata Singers in 1982, after having conducted performances with the ensemble on six earlier occasions. He had also performed with Cantata Singers as a horn player, led by three of the organization’s music directors, Philip Kelsey, John Ferris, and John Harbison.

During Mr. Hoose’s music directorship, the organization’s repertoire broadened greatly and, at the same time, continued its founding connection to the cantatas of J.S. Bach, both through nearly 200 cantata, mass, concerto and passion performances, and through the composer’s ongoing influence on all of the ensemble’s music-making. During these decades, the adventurous and often ambitious programming, as well as the quality of the performances, sustained an enviably high level, such that “setting the standard” appeared regularly in the leading music critics’ reviews. Regularly praised were the insightful weaving together of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar music, the organization’s reach beyond the expected bounds of a forty-voice chorus, and its engagement with less-known composers. These explorations included four successive seasons each focused on the life and music of a single composer—Weill, Vaughan Williams, Schütz, and Britten—the brain-child of then Executive Director Lisa Stiller.

Through these years, as the Cantata Singers repertoire reached from Schütz and Schein to the newest music, numbers of unusually rewarding or challenging works made several appearances, among them Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, Schütz’s Musikalische exequien, Bach’s Mass in B minor and Passion According to Saint Matthew, Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Belshazzar, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s “Faust,” the Brahms German Requiem, Bruckner’s Mass in E minor, the Vaughan Williams Mass in G minor, Stravinsky’s Les noces and Mass, Britten’s Cantata misericordium, Hindemith’s Apparebit repentina dies, Dallapiccola’s Canti di prigionia, Martin’s Mass and Et la vie l’emporta, Fine’s The Choral New Yorker, Schoenberg’s De Profundis and Friede auf Erden, Pärt’s Berliner Messe, Sur’s Sonnet 97, Fussell’s Spectrum Days, Harbison’s Emerson, and many of the compositions commissioned under Mr. Hoose’s leadership.

These Cantata Singers commissions were sixteen choral-orchestral works by twelve significant American composers: T.J. Anderson, Peter Child (2 works), John Harbison (3 works, the first of which, The Flight into Egypt, won the Pulitzer Prize), Stephen Hartke, Andrew Imbrie, Lior Navok, James Primosch, Elena Ruehr, Donald Sur, Andy Vores (2 works), and Yehudi Wyner. Performances of these commissions were among the more than fifty area premieres that Cantata Singers gave during Mr. Hoose's tenure; the most recent commission, a cantata by Richard Festinger, remains unperformed.

Several of the organization’s commissions hold social or political focus. John Harbison’s The Flight into Egypt responded to the plight of the homeless during the Christmas season; Peter Child’s Estrella criticized United States policy in Central America; Stephen Hartke’s Precepts took issue with hypocrisy among those who claim the Bible as their guide; Elena Ruehr’s Eve re-envisioned the first verses of Genesis through a feminist lens; and Child’s later Lamentations gave voice to the dispossessed and abandoned. There were two works that directly addressed the scourge of American Slavery: Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents and T.J. Anderson’s Slavery Documents 2. A third composition in the Slavery Documents series, Lior Navok’s And the Trains Kept Coming…. looked unflinchingly at the Allies’ failure to destroy the railroads transporting thousands of people to the concentration camps during the Second World War. While these Cantata Singers commissions (as well as a large measure of its other repertoire) have eschewed the eager-to-please choral music so present today, they live comfortably in the shadow of J.S. Bach, whose message was seldom an easy one.

During these years, the Cantata Singers presented several works in semi-staged performances, including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and The Little Sweep, a Kurt Weill Cabaret, and Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea. The organization’s programs also expanded to include a vocal chamber series (most recently led by Allison Voth), chamber chorus concerts, and numerous performances of purely instrumental and orchestral music. PALS Children’s Chorus, Youth pro Musica, Cantilena, the Lydian String Quartet, and John Ehrlich’s Spectrum Singers were among the other ensembles that appeared in concert with Cantata Singers.

Even as the chorus maintained its founding volunteer structure, increasing numbers of professional musicians were drawn to sing in the chorus as members. In addition to the many professionals who continue to sing with the Cantata Singers chorus, Ellen Hargis, William Hite, Lorraine Hunt (Lieberson), Rockland Osgood, Suzanne Peck, Gloria Raymond, Karl Dan Sorensen, and Elizabeth Weigle were past members. As well, at least sixteen conductors sang with the chorus, and Blanche Honegger Moyse, Constance DeFotis, Lan Shui, James Olesen, John Harbison, Amy Lieberman, and Joseph Flummerfelt appeared as guest conductors.

During these years, the organization developed an admired and sought-after cantata writing program, “Classroom Cantatas,” that was conceived, designed and run by then Executive Director Ann Marie Lindquist and composer Paul Brust, as part of the organization’s engagement with the Slavery Documents project. This educational program continues to serve students in the Boston public schools.

The last two concerts of the 2019-2020 season (including the anticipated premiere of Richard Festinger’s newly commissioned cantata) and the four programs of Mr. Hoose’s concluding season were cancelled in response to Covid-19. This program of music by Finzi, Haydn and Vaughan Williams was to be the last of those six programs.

David Hoose has been Music Director of Collage New Music for thirty seasons. He is Professor emeritus at Boston University, where he was the School of Music Director of Orchestras and taught orchestral conducting for twenty-nine years. And for eleven years, he was Music Director of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra.

He has appeared as guest conductor with the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra (on several occasions), Singapore Symphony Orchestra (twice), Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Orchestra Regionale Toscana (Italy), St. Louis Symphony, Utah Symphony, Chicago Philharmonic, Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra, Symphony New Hampshire, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and Handel & Haydn. He has conducted a large number of Boston musical organizations, including Emmanuel Music (many times), Fromm Chamber Players, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra (many times), Chorus pro Musica, Back Bay Chorale, Lexington Symphony, Dinosaur Annex, and Alea III. He has appeared as guest conductor at the Tanglewood, Monadnock, Warebrook, and New Hampshire music festivals.

For twenty summers, Mr. Hoose conducted the Young Artists Orchestra of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and he has appeared as guest conductor at the University of Southern California, Shepherd School at Rice University, and several times each at the New England Conservatory, Eastman School, and Manhattan School. From 2006 to 2010, he was on the faculty of the Rose City International Conducting Workshop, in Portland, Oregon. His former conducting students from Boston University now hold distinguished music directorships with opera companies, university orchestras, and professional orchestras in North America, Europe, and Asia.

The City of Boston proclaimed November 3, 2017, as “David Hoose Day,” for his “enormous contribution to the musical community both here in Boston and around the world.” In 2016, the Czech Republic awarded him the Silver Jan Masaryk Honorary Medal, presented “for [his] role in raising the profile of Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka’s music in the United States.” Mr. Hoose is also recipient of the Ditson Conductors Award for the Advancement of American Music, and the Choral Arts New England Lifetime Achievement Award. He was given the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming (with Cantata Singers), and he was honored by the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative for his contributions to the understanding and appreciation of culture from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. The City of Tallahassee designated a week in April 2004, “David Hoose Week,” for his contributions to the cultural life of the state capital and the region. In response to his performances as conductor and horn player, The Boston Globe named him “Musician of the Year” in 1986. And, with the Emmanuel Wind Quintet (Christopher Krueger, flute; Peggy Pearson, oboe; Bruce Creditor, clarinet; and Philip Long, bassoon), he was a recipient of the 1981 Walter W. Naumburg Award for Chamber Music. In 1980, he was winner of the Dmitri Mitropolous Award at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Mr. Hoose’s recordings appear on the New World, Albany, Nonesuch, Koch International, Delos, CRI, and Gun-Mar labels, and his recording of John Harbison’s Mottetti di Montale, with Collage New Music, was a Grammy Nominee for “Best Recording with Small Ensemble, With or Without Conductor.”

David Hoose grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, where his father, a conductor, was his high school music teacher. Mr. Hoose studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory with Richard Hoffmann and Walter Aschaffenburg, and at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero. He studied horn with Barry Tuckwell, Joseph Singer, Richard Mackey and Robert Fries, and his conducting studies were with Gustav Meier at the Tanglewood Music Center. Mr. Hoose is married to conductor Amy Lieberman.