David Stech
Professor of Music, Emeritus
David Stech served as a member of the Music Department faculty from 1972 until in 2008. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Music from the University of Minnesota-Duluth, his Master of Arts in Music from The Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. in Music from Michigan State University where he studied music theory pedagogy with Paul Harder.
Dr. Stech worked extensively with computer-assisted applications in music. In 1976, he programmed some of the first computer-assisted instructional applications to teach music fundamentals. These programs were made available to music students throughout the State of Alaska long before the internet was commonly used.
He was one of the first scholars to apply computer technology to the task of cataloging and analyzing transformations in music melodic patterns. His work in this area began at Michigan State in 1970, where he designed a large FORTRAN-language program which ran on massive main-frame computers.
From the late 1980’s he applied MIDI technology to the task of teaching advanced aural perception and music error detection skills to advanced music students.
Besides his work as a faculty member, Dr. Stech served as Chair of the Department of Music. An organist himself, he was the co-tonal designer of the three-manual, sixty-six stop Gress-Miles organ in UAF's Charles W. Davis Concert Hall. It is the largest pipe organ in the State of Alaska.
In 2006, Dr. Stech published a short chorale prelude for organ titled: Aus der Tiefe rufe ich. An excerpt from this work can be heard by viewing the a video by clicking here.
More recently, Dr. Stech has studied the recorded pipe organ improvisations by the renowned French organist Marcel Dupré. This has resulted in a number of publications introducing to the public music score reconstructions of Dupré pipe organ improvisations that had formerly existed only in rare archival tapes.
To prepare these volumes, Dr. Stech aurally studied each recorded improvisation carefully; directing his attention to each successive musical phrase, and then transcribing his aural perceptions into music notation so that today’s organists can replicate the improvisations. For these improvisations, there were no written music scores to begin with; the sources were only from Dupré’s recorded music performances.
Covers from some of Professor Stech’s publications are shown below. The most recent volumes, published by Wayne Leupold Editions USA, are part of a projected series of reconstructed improvisations by Marcel Dupré.
Click on each image below to see the contents for each volume.
