David Glaser was born in New York in 1952. He remembers at a very early age asking his parents to play some of the records they owned, especially Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Although he played French horn in his junior high school band and studied classical guitar in high school it wasn't until he heard Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire in college that he decided to pursue a career in music.

He studied at Hunter College (BA), Queens College (MA) and Columbia University (DMA). His teachers included Mario Davidovsky, George Edwards, Martin Boykan, Jacques-Louis Monod and Jack Beeson. He has been the recipient of a CAP Grant and a Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Grant from the American Music Center, the Dr. Boris and Eda Rapoport Prize in Composition from Columbia University and Fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Wellesley Composer's Conference. He received a 2007 Fromm Foundation commission to compose a work for Parthenia viol consort. In 2005 he received the Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters which described his work as "...subtly potent music of important potential."