David Rentz is Associate Professor of Music at Chaffey College, where he heads the choral and vocal music programs and teaches music theory. He is also Adjunct Professor of Music at Claremont Graduate University, where he supervises the masters and doctoral programs in choral and orchestral conducting. He is music director and principal conductor of the Orchestra Collective of Orange County and a founding co-conductor of C3LA (Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles). He has taught and conducted choral ensembles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale University, and, most recently, Pomona and Scripps Colleges. He also served as music director of the Orange County Symphony from 2011 to 2016 and choir director at the First Congregational Church of Riverside from 2011 to 2017.
From 2005 to 2010, David lived in New York City, where he worked as middle- and high-school choral director at The Brearley School, a K-12 girls preparatory school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A busy freelancer, he was also assistant conductor of the critically-acclaimed New Amsterdam Singers and a principal conductor and founding member of C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, a collectively-run ensemble devoted to performing works written in the last twenty-five years. His love of early music led him to found and direct Guildsingers, a professional vocal ensemble specializing in 15th-century Franco-Flemish repertoire.
David received his B.Mus. summa cum laude from Washington University in Saint Louis, where he was a Mylonas Scholar in the Humanities, inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. He earned his M.M at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Beverly Taylor), and received his M.M.A. and D.M.A. from the Yale University School of Music (Marguerite Brooks and Simon Carrington), where he was co-director of the University Chapel Choir and a member of the internationally-renowned Yale Schola Cantorum.
He has received fellowships and grants from the Yale alumniVentures program and the National Endowment for the Humanities and, in 2015, was named guest professor at Xiamen University (China). In 2020, he was in residence at the Pallotti School of Music in Belize City and at the University of Belize, where he taught, performed, and consulted on the imminent founding of the university’s Music Department. In demand as an adjudicator and clinician, he has served in those capacities for the Lansum International Choral Competition, the Claremont College Orchestra Concert Orchestra Concerto Competition, the Oremor Choral Competition, the Chaffey Joint Union High School District Choral Festival, the Southern California Vocal Association, and many others.