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 holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the Peabody Institute at 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 bringing new music to incarcerated communities in partnership with the DC Correctional Treatment Facility. He holds a Spring 2026 residency at Le Mondo Arts in Baltimore, where new works are being revealed throughout the season. Recent premieres include Kaleidoscope, a 44-minute collaboration with choreographer Zoë Brielle Payne combining SuperCollider synthesis, golden-ratio formal structures, and live viola performance, and upcoming premieres include Murmuration and Fugue for the 2025 Ernst von Siemens Prize-winning Tacet(i) Ensemble and a microtonal song-cycle for rock ensemble.

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, Genre at the Intersection: 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.