Artistic Staff

David Schildkret

David Schildkret, Music Director of the Mount Desert Summer Chorale, is Director of Choral Activities at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. There he conducts the highly select Concert Choir and the Choral Union (a large symphonic choir of students and community members), teaches classes in conducting and choral repertory, and oversees the doctoral program in choral conducting. He is Repertory and Standards Chair for Four-Year Colleges and Universities in the Arizona chapter of the American Choral Directors Association, and a member of the board of the National Collegiate Choral Organization. His choirs have performed for the Arizona Music Educators Association annual conference, and have appeared with the Kronos Quartet. This past season, the Concert Choir performed Bach's B-Minor Mass for the first time in its history.

Schildkret, a conductor, scholar, performer, and educator, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in southern New Jersey. He holds the Master and Doctor of Music degrees in Choral Conducting from Indiana University, where he studied with Robert Porco. He holds the Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was Dean of the Salem College School of Music in Winston-Salem, North Carolina from 1995-2002; prior to that, he taught at the University of Rochester in New York and Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Clayton W. Smith

Clayton W. Smith is a native of Maine who now lives in Bangor. After attending the University of Maine at Orono, he earned the Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Accompanying from the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music. He has performed at many diverse venues, including Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia; Musicana Dinner Theatre in Melbourne, Florida; and on the Canadian cruise ship MV Northern Ranger.

He currently accompanies The Down East Singers, as well as The Oratorio Society and the Opera Workshops of The University of Maine at Orono. Last summer he accompanied brass soloists from The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Chicago Symphony Orchestra in recital.

Mr. Smith's arrangements were used for the MPBN documentary "Remember the Maine," and he has created scores for silent films for Northeast Historic Film of Bucksport, ME. He is also the founding director of an American ensemble called The Bon-Ton Salon Orchestra, which recreates turn-of-the-century concerts featuring sing-alongs, marches and ragtime.