Real name: David K. Gompper

David Gompper (b. 1954) is an American composer, pianist, and conductor, professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa, recipient of the American Academy Of Arts And Letters Award (2009). He studied at the Royal College of Music, London with composer Humphrey Searle and pianist Phyllis Sellick and received a Ph.D. degree from The University of Michigan.

Before joining Iowa faculty in 1991, he had been teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, as well as abroad in Nigeria. In 2002, Gompper visited Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, where he spent a year teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. David actively collaborates with a violinist Wolfgang David from Vienna: they took Gompper's Echoes for violin and piano on a 12-concert tour throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe in 2007, went with Ikon on a second American-European tour with 14 stops, and participated together in numerous other projects. His music was performed at many prestigious venues around the world, such as Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, and ZKM | Institut für Musik und Akustik in Karlsruhe, Germany.