“Jan Tait and the Bear, by composer-librettist Emily Doolittle… delightfully reinvents opera as a casual form of community storytelling, based on a folk tale from the Isle of Fetlar in Shetland.”

GREGOR FORBES, THE CUSP

Composer Emily Doolittle was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and educated at Dalhousie, Indiana University, Princeton, and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, where she studied with Louis Andriessen. From 2008-2015 shelived in Seattle, where she was an Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts. She currently lives in Glasgow, UK, where she is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Doolittle enjoys writing for both traditional and less standard instrumentation, and has been commissioned by such ensembles and soloists as Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain (Montreal), the Kapten Trio, and Paragon. Recent projects include (re)cycling I: metals for found-object and recycled percussion, commissioned by Philharmonie Luxembourg for the Architek Percussion Ensemble, a set of pieces based on medieval Spanish and Ladino texts for Montreal-based early music group Ensemble La Cigale, and music for an Audible audiobook of Anne of Green Gables.

An ongoing interest for Doolittle is the relationship between music and sounds from the natural world, particularly bird and other animal songs. She has explored this in a number of compositions, as well as in collaborative interdisciplinary research with biologists and ornithologists. Other recurrent interests include folklore, musical storytelling, and making music for and with children.