Emily Doolittle


Emily Lenore Doolittle is a Canadian composer., zoomusicologist and Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland based in Glasgow, Scotland.
Her music, frequently inspired by folklore and the natural world has been commissioned and performed around the world. She is a member of the Scottish Music Centre and the Canadian Music Centre.

Life and work

Emily grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She studied at Dalhousie University, the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague,, Indiana University and Princeton University. From 2008 to 2015 she was an associate professor of music at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.
Emily has an interest in zoomusicology and the natural world. She has explored this in a number of works, her doctoral dissertation at Princeton and as a part of interdisciplinary birdsong research conducted alongside biologists and ornithologists. Together with cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bruno Gingras and Dominik Endres, she discovered that hermit thrush song follows the overtone series.
Of the development of her passion for bird and animal song, she has said: "I was studying at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague when a bird woke me up one morning. It sounded like human music and aroused my interest in animal song." Other predominant themes in her music include story-telling, music with and/or for children and folklore. Her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear was awarded a 2016 Opera America Discovery Grant and was selected for performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the 2018 Made in Scotland Showcase.
Her work has received numerous awards, including the 2012 Theodore Front Prize for A Short, Slow Life, two ASCAP Morton Gold Awards, the Joseph H. Bearns Prize, and the Sorel Organization Medallion in Recording. She has been commissioned by such ensembles as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Orchestre Métropolitain, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, and Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal

List of works

Chamber music

all spring - CD of chamber music performed by the Seattle Chamber Players and friends -