David Garner

He uses an eclectic mix of musical styles, including quotes from popular music of the 1870s and 1880s, along with a large amount of percussion and ostinato.

Much of the percussion employs traditional drumming patterns of the Caribbean, which Garner uses to represent the four major characters.

Hernandez’s libretto draws on language and circumstances of the time, drawing on the historical perspective gathered in Lynn M. Hudson’s book, “The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’.” Hernandez “felt it was important that it be as [historically] accurate as possible.”

Set in the 1880s, Mary Pleasant at Land’s End is composed of two acts (approximately two hours of music total), and calls for four principal artists, six comprimario artists, and mixed chorus.

The music is replete with the soaring vocalism for which Garner is so widely admired.

David Ross Garner (born August 4, 1954) is an American composer of opera and vocal, instrumental, and chamber music.

He is also an educator, on faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

David Garner was born in South Side, Chicago.

He spent most of his childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska and Lake Oswego, Oregon upon his parents’ relocations for academic positions.

He was given piano and cello lessons throughout his childhood and performed in recitals and with youth orchestras.

Garner attended UCLA as a Classics major for two years before deciding that music was a better match.

He left in 1974 and returned home to Oregon where he pursued music privately, playing blues, rock fusion, and classical piano while he prepared to audition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for the piano performance program.

He was originally rejected from the program and spent six months as an adult extension student before auditioning again and being accepted in 1976.

He would complete his degree in piano performance in 1979.

He has produced a continuous output of compositional work since the early 1980s, shortly after becoming a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory.

Concurrent with his graduating from the San Francisco Conservatory, Garner was appointed to the faculty as a part-time theory instructor, becoming full-time in 1984 when he was also named Chairman of the Musicianship and Theory Department.

He remained in that position until 2000, when he elected to take a position in the Composition Department.

He has remained in that position since and currently teaches composition, chamber music, and theory.

Garner began composing in his youth, and has never had a lesson in composition.

His body of work covers a wide variety of instrumentation, with his most prolific content being produced for the voice.

Garner’s previous operas include Daughter of Night (2010), and The Money Tree (1999), both one-act operas.

Music involving the voice makes up the majority of Garner’s works.

In this genre, Garner has been consistently lauded for his careful attention to setting text, his skill described as “getting to the semantic core of each of the poems he has set.” His eclectic background in musical styles informs his accompaniments, displaying rhythmic and melodic elements which support the texts of his pieces.

Garner’s compositions have won multiple awards and grants, including First Place for the American Prize in Composition in 2015 and two Silver Medals from the Global Music Awards for Spoon River Songs and Surviving: Women’s Words.

Garner developed a compositional technique for his String Quartet No. 2 which he calls Tonal Serialism.

He describes it as “a method of musical composition that uses precepts of the 12-tone techniques developed by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School with one important difference: where ‘classical serialism’ seeks to obscure tonal centricity and favor ‘free’ tonality, tonal serialism preserves harmonic and structural elements of traditional tonal music, most notably a purposeful gravitation toward a tonal center through the coincidence of vertical consonance and dissonance.”

Garner’s work is frequently commissioned by performers and organizations, and his compositions have been recorded on the Centaur and Pentatone labels, in addition to self-produced recordings and a release produced by Quadre Music Group.

He is also the resident composer for Ensemble for These Times, a chamber music group whose work focuses on contemporary repertoire.

Mary Pleasant at Land’s End is Garner’s first full-length opera, composed of two acts and set to a libretto by Mark Hernandez, also an alumnus of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The work was commissioned by Opera Parallèle.

The opera gives an account of Mary Ellen Pleasant, a daughter of slaves who assisted with the Underground Railroad before moving West to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.

The opera explores Pleasant’s significance as an integral part of the founding of San Francisco and the state of California, as she fought to ensure the civil rights of black settlers.

According to librettist Mark Hernandez, the opera “traces much of Pleasant’s astonishing life, beginning with her days as a shepherd for the Underground Railroad.

Arriving in San Francisco, she becomes a beloved leader in the young city.

Eventually, this daughter of slaves stands as one of the richest and most influential individuals of the time.

Her championing of people and causes, however, brings her into conflict with a more familiar face of wealth and power, and the ensuing struggle plays out in a notorious courtroom drama that mesmerizes the public.

Sensationalist press coverage demonizes Pleasant, playing on attitudes towards her race and gender.

An essential figure in the founding of San Francisco, and indeed the state of California, she is forgotten even as the city bursts into world prominence.”

A full workshop of the opera was presented on January 14, 2017 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The opera is slated to be the first major opera to come out of a conservatory for more than 100 years.