A composer of great diversity, Little’s music has been concurrently praised as “smoothly euphonious” (American Record Guide), and “clanking, almost industrial” (The Stage). 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.”  Little’s music has been featured at venues ranging from the Knitting Factory, Tonic and The Stone, to Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, and Aspen, and has been performed and commissioned by such musicians and groups as eighth blackbird, So Percussion, Newspeak, The Formalist Quartet, The Grand Rapids Symphony, I-20 Gallery, The Albany Symphony, The New York City Opera, and conductor Marin Alsop.  

           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 and Alex Rose, 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, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University.  His primary teachers have included Osvaldo Golijov, Steven Mackey, Paul Lansky, William Bolcom, and Michael Daugherty.  He has received grants, fellowships and awards from BMI, ASCAP, the Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Music Center, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Meet The Composer, the University of Michigan, and Princeton. 

           David T. Little received a 2008 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.  He is the founder, artistic director, and drummer for the band / ensemble Newspeak, co-founder / co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions, and a PhD candidate (ABD) at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on political music theatre. 

           Forthcoming works include Spalding Gray (Spinning Sadness) for the NOW Ensemble, Requiem for the Third Coast Percussion Quartet, and a new theatrical cantata based on the mythology of the Molly Maguires to be performed by Newspeak.  A new production of his critically acclaimed theatre work Soldier Songs is currently being produced by Beth Morrison Projects and directed by Yuval Sharon for a September, 2008 New York premiere.