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 is a doctoral candidate in composition at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University (expected May 2026), where he teaches music theory. He previously studied with Felipe Lara, Oscar Bettison, Tony Arnold, and Wendel Patrick at Peabody, and 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 innovative initiative bringing new music to incarcerated communities in partnership with the DC Correctional Treatment Facility. He holds a monthly residency at Le Mondo Arts, a Baltimore non-profit venue dedicated to experimental and boundary-pushing performance, where many new works will be revealed throughout 2025. Upcoming premieres include commissions for Tacet(i) Ensemble and Kinetic Percussion Quartet.

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 Music Theory and Musicianship at the Peabody Institute and served on the faculty of Towson University and the Walden School (2024), where he taught Composition, Musicianship, and Rock: A Practical Survey. He previously co-directed Fast Forward Austin, an Austin-based 501(c)3 dedicated to presenting experimental music in accessible venues. He is the recipient of the 2025 Gena Branscombe Scholarship in Composition and was a 2024 Fulbright Semi-Finalist.

From complex modernist mayhem to gentle electric noise, from interdisciplinary dreamlands to intense composed theater, from games and graphically redacted grooves to microtonal madness, David lives in sound—and he's not afraid to try something wild.