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David Garner (composer)

American composer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ29995060 ↗
Source-derived summary

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.

Early life, education, and personal life

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 is married to the classical pianist Dale Tsang, who has premiered many of his solo piano and chamber works, along with distinguished soloists.

Editorial summary

“David Garner (composer)” enters the record as american composer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Garner and composer can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1954, 1974, 1976, 1979—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1954-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around David, Garner and composer.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“David Garner (composer)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, David, Garner and composer provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29995060. VIAF identifies the subject as 83597224. The Library of Congress control number is no2009039744. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1974, 1976 and 1979.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “David Garner (composer)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow David Garner (composer) primary sources, David Garner (composer) archive and David research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “David Garner (composer)”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “David Garner (composer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.