A two-time BMI Student Composer Award Winner (2002 for hope in the proles and 2004 for Piano Trio) Little’s composition Screamer! was chosen by Maestro David Zinman as the winner of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Award for Orchestral Composition from the Aspen Music Festival, where Little was a Schumann Fellow during the summer of 2003.   He is a 2003 recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as the 2001 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center.  Little was awarded the 2004 Harvey Gaul Prize from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, which resulted in the commissioning of his theatre piece Soldier Songs, which recently received its New York debut, in a new production by Beth Morrison Projects.  He was awarded a 2006 ASCAP Morton Gould Award for his work Red Scare Sketchbook, and was most recently named a 2008 Artist Fellow from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

            A composer of great diversity, Little’s music has been concurrently praised as “smoothly euphonious…with tonal yet original harmonies” (American Record Guide), and “clanking, almost industrial” (The Stage).  Eric Haines of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette states “Composer David Little is not yet 30 and is still working on his Ph.D., yet his list of classical works is as long as your arm. If his latest…is any indication, quality equals quantity in a big way.” Alex Ross of The New Yorker was “completely gripped” by Little’s Sunday Morning Trepanation, proclaiming: “every bad-ass new-music ensemble in the city will want to play him.”

            An active performer, improviser and collaborator, Little has performed extensively in the United States and Europe. His performance as a rock drummer has been praised as “on fire, both crazed and surgically accurate” (Steve Gisselbrecht - The Noise) and “excellent” (hybridmagazine.com).  He has collaborated with: artist Timothy Hutchings, writers Todd Craig, Alex Rose, and Royce Vavrek, and choreographers Anita Cheng, Nanine Linning, Jessica Fogel, Eliza Miller, Adele Myers and Aimee McDonald, whose 2003 collaboration Come Here to Me was praised as “precisely realized”, and “refreshing” by www.hour.ca (Montreal) and “beautiful” by The Stage (Edinburgh).

            Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Percussion Performance, Little holds a Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University.  His primary teachers have included William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, Osvaldo Golijov, Paul Lansky, and Steven Mackey.  Currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, Little is the founder and artistic director of the band / ensemble Newspeak and co-founder and co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions with composers Missy Mazzoli and Judd Greenstein. 

            Little’s music has been heard at: The Saxonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dresden; the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Fest; the 2004 Montreal Fringe Fest; La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; Tanglewood; Aspen; Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival; the Merce Cunningham Studio, NYC; Joyce SoHo, NYC; The Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space and at Susquehanna University, SUNY Albany, The Oberlin Conservatory, Juilliard, the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton.  It has been commissioned and/or performed by such musicians, ensembles, and organizations as: eighth blackbird, The Amelia Piano Trio, So Percussion, Tetras String Quartet, ensemble courage, Newspeak, Electric Kompany, NOW Ensemble, The Grand Rapids Symphony, The New York City Opera, New World Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and conductor Marin Alsop, who conducted the West Coast premiere of Little’s orchestral work Screamer! at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2004, where Little served as Composer-In-Residence.