A
native of Seattle, Washington, David Yearsley was educated at
Harvard and studied the organ with Edward Hansen, Christa Rakich, William
Porter, Harald Vogel and Kimberly Marshall.
He has been the winner of numerous prizes at national and
international competitions; in 1992 he was awarded the top prize at the
International Schnitger Organ Competition, held on the famous historic
instruments of Norden, Germany and Groningen and Alkmaar in the
Netherlands, and in 1994 he won first prize at the Bruges early Music
Festival. The same year at
Bruges he received first prize for positiv organ duo along with Annette
Richards.
Active
also as a clavichordist, Mr. Yearsley holds a Ph.D. in music history from
Stanford University, and divides his energies among performing, teaching,
and writing; his scholarly work focuses on late 17th and early
18th century music and has appeared in the Journal of the
American Musicological Society and Music and Letters.
He is currently assistant professor of music at Cornell University.
Robert
Bates is University Organist at Stanford University, where he received
a Ph.D. in musicology. He has won top prizes for organ performance
in Bruges, Fort Wayne, San Antonio and Detroit, and he has been awarded
the Prix d’Excellence and the Prix de Virtuosité, both from the class
of Marie-Claire Alain by unanimous consent of the jury. Other
teachers include Ray Ferguson, Herb Nanney and Robert Anderson. He
has performed concert tours of Switzerland, France, Sweden, Mexico and the
U.S, and played for French and Swiss National Radios.
He
is a specialist in seventeenth-century French and Spanish organ music, the
history of theory, and early tuning systems; his articles have appeared in
the Organ Yearbook, Music and Letters and Performance Practice Review.
Dr. Bates has been invited to perform, lecture and compose music for many
conferences and festivals, including national meetings of the American
Musicological Society, the American Guild of Organists, the Organ
Historical Society, the American Organ Academy and the American Institute
of Organ Builders. He has been granted a distinguished alumnus award
for artistic achievement from Wayne State University in Detroit.