David Blake (born 2 September 1936) is an English composer and founder member of the Department of Music at the University of York.
He went on to read music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his teachers were Patrick Hadley, Peter Tranchell and Raymond Leppard.
He was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship for Composition in 1960, and, uniquely for a British composer of his generation, he went to East Berlin to study with Arnold Schoenberg's pupil, the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler, as a Meisterschüler of the GDR Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts, Berlin).
[1] In 1963, he was awarded the Granada Arts Fellowship at the newly opened University of York, and the following year, with Wilfrid Mellers and Peter Aston, he founded the Department of Music there.
[1] He also went on to found the University of York Music Press – known as UYMP – in 1995 with Bill Colleran, with a purpose to promote new and established composers with a range of aesthetic backgrounds.