David Evan Thomas

The music of David Evan Thomas has been praised for its eloquence, power and craft. The recipient of a 2013 McKnight Foundation Fellowship and an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Thomas has received commissions from the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Schubert Club and the American Composers Forum. His music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, London’s Westminster Cathedral Choir and the trio of Gil Shaham, Truls Mørk and Yefim Bronfman. Thomas has served as a FaithPartners composer-in-residence with Westminster Presbyterian Church and the Cathedral of Saint Paul, the Schubert Club and St. Paul Academy. Recent collaborations include The Bridge, a Minnesota Commissioning Club commission for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony’s 2014 tour of Spain.

Vocal music is particularly prominent in Thomas’s catalogue, which also includes orchestral music, forty chamber works, keyboard pieces large and small, and an opera. A dozen song cycles explore such diverse topics as the medieval women troubadours and the baseball prose of Donald Hall, and there are fifty choral works, including the 2012 oratorio The First Apostle. Thomas’s vocal music is published by ECS/MorningStar, Classical Vocal Reprints and Yelton-Rhodes, and is available through www.davidevanthomas.com. `

Born in Rochester, New York in 1958, David Evan Thomas began his training as a trumpeter, graduating with Honors from Eastman “Prep.” He received degrees from Northwestern University, Eastman School of Music and the University of Minnesota.  His teachers have included Dominick Argento, Samuel Adler and Alan Stout, with further study at the Aspen Festival and with David Diamond at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. 

Thomas lives in Minneapolis, where he is also active as a program annotator, choral singer and pianist.