David Montgomery is an American conductor, pianist, and musicologist. He studied in Paris with René Leibowitz and in the U.S. and Vienna with Paul Badura-Skoda. He became Leibowitz's assistant in France, specializing in music of the Second Viennese school. Later, he studied the interpretation of contemporary music with Pierre Boulez in Los Angeles. After completing a PhD in musicology at UCLA, he taught for several years at UC Santa Barbara.

In 1990 Montgomery joined the summer faculty of the Waterloo Festival at Princeton University as a chamber music coach and Director of the Baroque Ensemble. He worked in New York for Sony Tri-Star/Columbia Pictures as a conductor, and then in Europe for the editorial and production divisions of Sony Music Inc and Sony Classical GmbH. From Hamburg, Montgomery toured Europe as a pianist and helped to revitalize the Jena Philharmonic in the former East Germany as the orchestra's principal guest conductor. With the Philharmonic he made recordings for BMG's Arte Nova label in Munich.

David Montgomery's first book, Franz Schubert's Music in Performance (Pendragon, 2003/paperback 2010) has become widely known in performance and scholarly circles. He is an authority on Austro-German music of the past several centuries, and his essays for the international recording industry have been translated into numerous languages and distributed throughout the world. Montgomery has lectured at Georgetown University, the College of William and Mary, University of Chicago, Harvard University, the Universities of Halle and Göttingen, and at the major campuses of the University of California.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Wage-Labor, Bondage and Citizenship: 1. The Right to Quit; 2. Free Labor in the Shadow of Slavery; 3. Quitting and Getting Paid; 4. Citizenship and the Terms of Employment; Part II. Policing People for the Free Market: 5. The Definition and Prosecution of Crime; 6. The Privatization of Poor Relief; 7. The Crime of Idleness; 8. Arms and the Man; 9. Police Powers and Workers' Homes; Part III. Political Parties: 10. Black Workers and Republicans in the South; 11. Industrial Workers and Party Politics; 12. Workers and Tammany Hall; 13. Labor Reform and Electoral Politics; 14. Citizenship and the Unseen Hand; Bibliography.