Dr. David Schrader joined the CCPA faculty in 1986 and is the professor of music in the Core Studies Department. As a teacher of music history, he views himself as an ombudsman between academe and performance.
He has been become renowned as a virtuoso on instruments that include the harpsichord, organ, clavichord and piano and his talents have taken him
throughout the United States and Europe. In Chicago, he can be seen performing in venues from the Haymarket Opera, to the Grant Park Symphony to the Ravinia festival, during CCPA student recitals and concerts and with Baroque Band—an ensemble began in 2007 that has quickly earned a name for itself as one of America's most exciting period-instrument orchestras. On Sundays, he plays the organ for the Church of the Ascension—a position he has held for 34 years.
Schrader was adopted at six weeks old. His parents acquired his first piano when he was 8. He started playing the organ at 16 and the harpsichord as a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Music of all kinds was one of my first thought processes," he remembered. "Like literature is precious to someone who teaches English."
In recalling how attitudes to LGBTQ musicians have changed over the years, Schrader remembered his days as an undergraduate piano student. He was informed by his teacher Storm Bull—a former student of Béla BartÃ�"k—that a judge in a competition he had entered was biased against his sexual orientation. "I can't say that's happened since," Schrader recalled with a laugh. "I think there's been a passing of the old guard. No profession can avoid it. I mean, my God, if you took LGBTQs out of the church, the whole institution would stop."
Schrader was 19 when he came out. In 1983, he discovered he was HIV positive. "I've always been philosophical about things like this," he said. "I just kind of went on. There was a while I would be looking through trade journals and I'd see who died. I didn't really get scared until the summer o '85. I got really sick and I was wondering when I would check out."
Schrader said that, while society may be open about discussing LGBTQ issues, he believes it to be generally more sexually conservative, especially amongst his LGBTQ students. "Some people get caught up right about AIDS education," he said. "Some think, to their woe, that it is simply a condition that can be managed."
Although he will never conduct a student interview without his office door open, Schrader said that he doesn't have much to fear from LGBTQ detractors. "I've always adopted a two-pronged philosophy," he said. "Until I know differently, everybody loves me and I'm going to kill them with kindness."
Schrader is proud of the many students he has sent into the musical world. "I'll go to a concert and find out that one of my former students is in the orchestra and think 'all right, I'm doing what I trained for.'"
THE STATS
Age
"Accomplished"
Neighborhood
Rogers Park
Job title
Professor of music, Chicago College of
Performing Arts ( CCPA ) Core Studies
Department
Relationship status
Happily partnered to Patrick for 22
years; married in Montreal in 2005
Bucket list item
To support historically informed
musical groups
Favorite composer
"Whoever I happen to be working on
at the time. At the end of the March,
I'm doing two pieces with Baroque
Band by two composers: Carl Phillip
Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann. I
call them 'S.O.B.'s- Sons of Bach.'"
Music he dislikes
"Jazz: It doesn't move me."
Favorite European country
"England is the one I've been to the
most and there is nothing I don't like
about it."
