David Claman was born in Boston in 1958 and grew up in Denver, Colorado. As a teenager, he became interested in visual art and intended to become a painter. However, inspired by the work of John Cage, Claman eventually turned his focus to music. He attended Wesleyan University, where he studied electronic music with Ron Kuivila and received his B.A. in 1982. After graduating, he played electric bass in rock bands in Boston and began studying composition at the Longy School in Cambridge. Claman earned a master’s of music in theory and composition from the University of Colorado in 1993 and a Ph.D. in composition from Princeton University in 2002, where he also wrote a dissertation entitled Western Composers and India’s Music: Concepts, History, and recent Music.
Claman now balances composing, scholarly work, and teaching. He is an assistant professor at Lehman College-CUNY in The Bronx, NY where he teaches music theory and electronic music. In 1998, he received a fellowship from The American Institute of Indian Studies to study in India, and subsequently held residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. He has received commissions from numerous famous composers, ensembles, and musical groups. Claman has presented scholarly papers on topics related to his dissertation at regional and national music theory and ethnomusicology conferences, as well as at the annual South Asia conferences in Madison, Wisconsin.
