Meet our Music Director

David P. Sartor (rhymes with “Carter”) is a widely performed composer, an in-demand conductor, a proven educator, and the founder and Music Director of Nashville’s award-winning Parthenon Chamber Orchestra. Sartor's compositions and conducting skills have been recognized with more than four dozen prestigious honors and awards that include the American Bandmasters Association's Ostwald Award for Symphonic Wind Ensemble Music, the National Fine Arts Award, a New Music for Young Ensembles composition prize, and thirty-five ASCAP PLUS awards for compositions of unique prestige value. A fourteen-time honoree in The American Prizes, national awards celebrating American excellence in the arts, Sartor recently won Third Place nationally in their Competition for Orchestral Conducting - making him the only person to date to win American Prizes in three major categories: Conducting, Composition and Orchestral Performance. The committee of judges also designated him as an "Honored Artist of the American Prize,” in recognition of “sustained excellence” in the competitions.

As a guest conductor, composer and lecturer, Sartor's engagements include the Washington National Cathedral, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra, the Indiana Wind Symphony, the Nexus Chamber Orchestra, the Vanderbilt University Orchestra, Illinois State University, Middle Tennessee State University, Trevecca Nazarene University, the Knoxville Brass Choir, the University of Tennessee Brass Choir, the Dogwood Arts Festival Chamber Orchestra, and a conducting “mini-residency” at California State University sponsored by New York City’s Meet The Composer Foundation. He appears regularly as orchestra conductor at Bachanalia, an annual six-hour regional festival of works by Johann Sebastian Bach in downtown Nashville, and is a frequent conductor of the Nashville Concerto Orchestra, featuring local and area soloists. An experienced educator, Sartor has served on the music faculties of Belmont University, Middle Tennessee State University, Cumberland University, and Trevecca Nazarene University.

Sartor resides in Middle Tennessee with his wife, the award-winning author Nancy Sartor.