Dr. David McConnell holds teaching and conducting positions in both Berks and Lehigh Counties in Pennsylvania.  At Pennsylvania State University (Berks Campus) he teaches two levels of Western Music History, a World Music class and conducts the College Choir.  Starting in the fall of 2010, Dr. McConnell will teach Theory and private piano and organ lessons at Alvernia University, also in Reading.  As Minister of Music at Immanuel UCC in Shillington, he plays for weekly liturgies, conducts the Senior Choir, and oversees the training and rehearsing of six other choirs. The Senior Choir regularly performs major works, and in the last few years has performed Haydn's Creation, Requiem by Mozart, Rutter and Faure, the first and third part of Handel's Messiah and Lauridsen's Lux aeterna.

Dr. McConnell is also the Choral Director at Lehigh Carbon Community College, where he started the college choir in February 2005. The choir currently meets on Monday evenings and is made up of current students and faculty, alumni and members of the community.

Dr. McConnell received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in December 2002. At Cincinnati his teachers included Earl Rivers, John Leman, Richard Westenberg, Fiora Contino, and Vance George. A native of Philadelphia, Dr. McConnell also holds degrees from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey and Temple University in Philadelphia. He has attended the prestigious Pierre Monteux School for Conductors and Orchestral Musicians in Hancock, Maine, the South Carolina Conductor's Institute in Columbia, South Carolina, and The Conductors Institute at Bard College.

Dr. McConnell's dissertation at Cincinnati examined and compared the six published completions of the Mozart Requiem. His thesis was submitted by the choral faculty at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music to contend for the Julius Herford Prize, a prestigious award for excellent scholarship and analysis in a thesis or dissertation. In addition, he has presented papers on completions of the Mozart Requiem at the national American Choral Directors Association in San Antonio, Texas, the College Music Society Northeast Chapter Conference in Lewiston, Maine, and a concert by the Central City Chorus in New York City.
 

His articles and reviews are published in the Journal of the American Choral Directors Association and the International Federation of Choral Music Magazine.  He has conducted choirs in Amsterdam, Portugal and Latvia, as well as throughout the northeast portion of the United States.