David W. Moore, 88, a cellist and a member of Local 802 since 1958, died on Sept. 7, 2026 at his home in Rockland County.

His parents Ella and Donald Moore met as art and architecture students attending Cornell University and they settled into family life on the shores of Lake Cayuga just above Ithaca.

Young David began playing the cello at age 8 and showed musical promise early. While still a high school student he was playing inside first cello in the Cornell University Orchestra. The Galamian Summer Camp at Meadowmount put him in front of Leonard Rose who encouraged him to attend Juilliard where he began studies in 1955. In 1958 he went abroad with the Juilliard Orchestra under Jean Morel; they performed in six European countries including a much-lauded concert at the Expo ’58 in Brussels.

While at school together, a shared love of silliness put David in the orbit of Peter Schickele and he made amateur recordings and participated in early efforts that Shickele made towards his career as PDQ Bach

David earned a bachelor’s and a master’s at Juilliard and studied conducting with Jorge Mester.

At the same time, his professional career was taking off. He found steady work playing in the Radio City Orchestra. He was thrilled to get an opportunity to write music reviews for the American Record Guide, a job he did with an almost religious zeal for almost six decades.

He performed and recorded with the Kohon String Quartet, including on a record of all four Schoenberg String Quartets for Vox in 1967. He was also signed to a friend’s recording label, Max Schubel’s Opus One, which specialized in contemporary works. For his solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 1965 he played Brahms, Vivaldi and Martinu as well as a piece of Schubel’s, “Omphaloskepsis,” which he would also record in 1967 on an LP of modern cello works. On that record (the disc was simply titled Opus One No. 6) David played a piece by another friend and colleague, Meyer Kupferman, a clarinetist and composer whose annual Music By My Friends concerts at Carnegie Hall were always fine affairs. David met plenty of adventurous musicians and composers playing those concerts and would go on to work with many of them elsewhere. (In 1973 he premiered a solo cello work called “Tesserae II” by Brian Fennelly and in 1980 recorded another of Brian’s cello works, “Scintilla Prisca.”)

For a number of years, David would pack the family up and drive down to Charleston to perform modern works at the Piccolo Spoleto festival; in 1981 he was part of a standout series of concerts there celebrating the music of Karl and Vally Weigl. (Although Karl had died decades earlier, Vally was in attendance and performed in what would be some of her last public appearances before her death the next year.)

David’s attachment to and interest in the NYC contemporary classical scene would never fade away; however, with an eye towards supporting a family he started applying himself more to working on Broadway. His initiation to this sort of work was auspicious, he played in the pit for Yul Brynner’s return to Broadway in 1977 with “The King and I.”

Following that, he played the full run at “Evita,” performed in period dress on stage for the ill-fated “Three Musketeers” (1984), subbed all kinds of other shows, and finally got in at “Les Misérables” and stayed steady there until he retired in 2003 (the year of the Broadway strike).

David lived with his family in Queens during the 70’s and 80’s and became the long-time first cellist at the Queens Symphony Orchestra; he was also a founding member of the Rosewood Chamber Ensemble based in Sunnyside.

He went back to school towards the end of the 1980’s, working on a PhD in musicology from NYU for which he completed all but dissertation.

In the 1990’s, he and his wife Sharon bought an old farmhouse from folksinger Susan Reed and lived near Nyack, slowly winding down professional gigs in the city and focusing on teaching and playing with ensembles in the Rockland and Bergen County area.

David is survived by his wife Sharon and son Ian.

Obituary submitted by Ian Moore.