Recent projects include the operas JFK (Thaddeus Strassberger, director; Royce Vavrek, librettist), and Dog Days (Robert Woodruff, director; Royce Vavrek, librettist),[6] Haunt of Last Nightfall for Third Coast Percussion, AGENCY, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet as part of its 40th anniversary season,[7] Ghostlight—ritual for six players for eighth blackbird,[8] dress in magic amulets, dark, from My feet for the combined forces of The Crossing and International Contemporary Ensemble.
The work starred Lauren Worsham as Lisa, a 13-year-old girl who befriends a man in a dog suit begging for scraps during a post-apocalyptic wartime scenario.
Ronni Reich of The Star-Ledger wrote of Little's score: "Little's music thrashes, with dark, epic, chaotic heavy rock inspiration meeting lurching, bellowed vocal lines.
"[25] The piece began as a commission from Carnegie Hall when Little was chosen to compose a 20-minute work of music theater as part of Dawn Upshaw and Osvaldo Golijov's workshop in collaboration with singers from Bard Conservatory.
Created for rock band Timur and the Dime Museum, it was commissioned and produced by Beth Morrison Projects, and premiered in October, 2022 at Opera Philadelphia in a film-based production directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken.
Drawing on historical accounts of the sin-eater as a way to explore social inequities in contemporary culture, the libretto was fashioned by the composer from texts by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Harold McGee, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Jonathan Swift, Claude McKay, and others.
Using "jarring transitions and juxtapositions," SIN-EATER was called, "a broad, nuanced, and often profoundly unsettling examination of how some members of society are compelled to absorb toxicity and terror so that others can live free and unharmed.
[34] Scored for solo tenor and an orchestra of sixteen, the work had its world premiere in September 2024 at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, starring Karim Sulayman and directed by Mark Morris.