Rate My Professor David Kendall

David Kendall is a Professor of Music at La Sierra University, where he teaches in the Department of Music and contributes to the Arts and Culture curriculum through courses such as UNHR 115: The Arts in the Honors Program. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Historical Musicology from the University of California, Riverside, where he received a Chancellor’s Fellowship, and a B.Mus. in Instrumental Performance (low brass) from La Sierra University in 2002. Kendall joined La Sierra as a full-time faculty member in 2014, following service as an adjunct professor there from 2003 to 2014, a lecturer in Music at UC Riverside from 2010 to 2014, and Minister of Music at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Riverside from 2007 to 2014. In 2016, he served as Visiting Professor of Musicology at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, College of Music during a research sabbatical funded for documentary research on liturgical music in the Philippines.

Kendall's research specializes in Spanish colonial music in the former Spanish colonial world, especially the Philippines, and organology, focusing on 19th-century brass instruments and their role in the late-century revivals of Bach and Handel. He authored The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination (Lexington Books, 2023). Select publications include “Parish Music History and Economic Administration: Three Case Studies in the Central Visayas” and “Roman Catholic Liturgical Music in the Intra-Colonial Period in the Philippines (1880-1940),” in Arwin Tan, ed., Saysay Himig: a Source Book on Philippine Music History, ca. 1880-1941 (University of the Philippines Press, 2018); “Exotic Exhibitionism at the Exhibit: Music and the Evolutionary Sociocultural Continuum at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair,” Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7, no. 2 (Ateneo University Press, 2017); “Singing to Subdue or Sustain?: Looking for an Ethic of Conservation in Christian Liturgical Song and Hymnody,” in Melissa Brotton, ed., Ecotheology and Nonhuman Ethics: Community and Compassion (Lexington Books, 2017); and multiple articles in Pintacasi: a Journal of Church Cultural Heritage (2009–2013). He has delivered numerous presentations at conferences including the American Musicological Society, University of the Philippines, and Cornell University. Kendall maintains memberships in the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, American Musical Instrument Society, and Historic Brass Society. An active trombonist and euphonium instructor, he performs in university ensembles and formerly directed a Civil War-era brass ensemble featured in films and television.