David Carlton Adams
composer · performer · educator
David Carlton Adams is a composer, performer, and presenter of vocal, instrumental, and electronic music that seeks to cut, reflect, connect, and heal. He engages with contemporary chamber music, opera, improvisation, rock, and the spaces where these genres collide.
David's music has been performed by the JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Linea, Friction Quartet, Rothko Quartet, Old Bay New Music, and many others. A co-founder of the New Uncertainty Collective and the experimental quartet SALLT, he recently earned his Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the Peabody Institute at The Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Felipe Lara, Oscar Bettison, Tony Arnold, and Wendel Patrick. He previously studied with Don Grantham and Yevgeniy Sharlat at the University of Texas at Austin.
Through the New Uncertainty Collective, David co-produces concerts featuring emerging composers and collaborative projects including Project Poetic Justice, an initiative connecting residents at the DC Jail with local artists through music, poetry, and performance. His Spring 2026 residency at Le Mondo Arts in Baltimore concluded in April with the premieres of new original works for rock ensemble and electronics. Recent premieres include Murmuration and Fugue for the 2025 Ernst von Siemens Prize-winning Tacet(i) Ensemble, and Kaleidoscope, a 44-minute collaboration with choreographer Zoë Brielle Payne combining SuperCollider synthesis, recording sessions and DAW mixing, and a novel show-runner app called CuePilot. Kaleidoscope ran at the Charm City Fringe Festival in May 2026.
As a performer, David has appeared alongside members of Wet Ink Ensemble, Friction Quartet, and ICE as an electric guitarist, vocalist, and electronic musician. His custom "Pedal Stool"—an ever-evolving meta-instrument incorporating digital and analog effects pedals—processes voice, strings, and electronics in both composed and improvised contexts. Having jammed funk-rock at Antone's in Austin, sung in choral premieres at Chicago's Auditorium Theater, and free improvised at Baltimore's Red Room, he is at home in a variety of spaces.
David teaches undergraduate music theory at the Peabody Institute and has taught at Towson University and the Walden School. His dissertation, Live from the Liminal Space: On the Intersection of Experimental Rock and Contemporary Classical Music, examines how composers and ensembles navigate the porous boundaries between art-music and rock traditions. He is the recipient of the 2025 Gena Branscombe Scholarship in Composition and was a 2024 Fulbright Semi-Finalist.
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