David Wolfson is a composer, music director, arranger, and pianist who lives in New York City. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1985, and in that same year was the first recipient of the newly established Darius Milhaud Award and won the Bascom Little Fund's Musical Theatre Composition Competition for his short opera Rainwait. After many years attending the school of hard knocks, he transferred to Hunter College, graduating with an MA in music composition in 2013, and is currently a PhD candidate in composition at Rutgers University.
His compositional output has included music for dance and transdisciplinary performance and incidental music for plays; opera, musicals, children’s musicals and comedy songs; song cycles, chamber music and music for orchestra; and one memorable score for an amusement park big-headed costumed character show.
From 2007-2010, Mr. Wolfson was the Associate Artistic Director, Music Director and resident composer of Experience Vocal Dance Company. His compositions for the company have been performed in Hannover, Germany, New York and London. His work with the company was supported by grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund and the Joyce Dutka Foundation.
From 1989-1992, Mr. Wolfson was resident composer and music director of EM/R Dance Co., a choreographer's collective. From 1993-1996, he was co-artistic director of Wichern/Wolfson dance & music, a company dedicated to performances involving both dance and live music. In connection with the company, Mr. Wolfson received several grants from Meet The Composer and a grant from the Music Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr Wolfson's music for these companies was called 'brilliant' by the Cleveland Plain Dealer; the New York Times referred to it as 'musically inventive' and 'theatrically forceful.'
Mr. Wolfson was the composer for Story Salad, a series of stage revues for children which was toured nationally for thirteen consecutive years by Maximillion Productions, and one year by Story Salad Productions, Inc. Story Salad was seen by well over a million children, teachers and parents.
His theatrical song cycle Dreamhouse, based on the poetry of Barbara DeCesare, premiered in 2005 in New York City as part of the Sixth Annual Midtown International Theatre Festival.
In 2013 Albany Records released Seventeen Windows, a CD of his music, performed by pianist Jenny Lin and cellist Laura Bontrager. In addition, Song For An Accident from the theatrical song cycle Dreamhouse was recorded by Tamra Hayden on her CD A Day At The Fair; the lullaby Like Water was recorded by EVDC principal artist Karen Jolicoeur on her CD The Dream That You Wish; and Time and Tide, for cello quartet, is the final cut on Suzanne Mueller’s CD Solitaire.
Mr. Wolfson was the Music Director of the New York Theatrical Community Chorus from 2002-2007.
He has served as music director and/or arranger/orchestrator for over sixty regional or Off-Broadway musicals and four Off-Broadway cast albums. In addition, he has played piano in the pits of twenty-five Broadway shows, and served as a rehearsal pianist, copyist or synthesizer programmer for productions in venues ranging from Broadway theatres to elementary school cafetoriums.