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. Awarded the 2004 Harvey Gaul Composition Prize from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Little was most recently awarded a 2006 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his Red Scare Sketchbook.

            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). Alex Ross of The New Yorker was “completely gripped” by Little’s “ultra-dissonant” 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).  He has collaborated with: artist Timothy Hutchings, writer Todd Craig, and choreographers Anita Cheng, Nanine Linning, Jessica Fogel, Eliza Miller 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.  His primary teachers have included William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, and Osvaldo Golijov. Currently a graduate fellow at Princeton University, Little is the founder and artistic director of the band / ensemble Newspeak, in which he also plays drum set, and co-founder and co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions with composers Missy Mazzoli and Judd Greenstein.

         Little's music has been heard throughout the United States and Europe, including performances in:

• La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
• The Saxonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dresden
• The 2006 Look and Listen Festival
• The 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Fest
  
• The 2004 Montreal Fringe Fest
• Strasbourg, France
  
• The Theatre and Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood
  
• The Atlantic Center for the Arts
  
• Inside/Out at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival
  
• Merce Cunningham Studio, NYC
  
• Joyce SoHo, NYC
  
• Susquehanna University, Oberlin Conservatory, SUNY Albany, the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard and Princeton University.

         He has received numerous commissions, including those from: the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music for the Amelia Piano Trio, the Dresden-based Ensemble-Courage, and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, and his works have been performed by such ensembles as So Percussion, eighth blackbird, the Tetras String Quartet, and the Grand Rapids Symphony. This summer, conductor Marin Alsop led the West Coast premiere of Little’s orchestral work Screamer! at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where Little served as Composer-In-Residence.