Leland Smith

Leland Smith (born August 6, 1925 in Oakland , † December 17, 2013 in Palo Alto ) was an American composer , bassoonist and music teacher .

Life

At the age of eleven, Smith began to learn to play the piano and woodwind, as well as brass and string instruments. From 1941 he took private lessons in counterpoint , composition and instrumentation from Darius Milhaud , who taught as an emigrant at Mills College . From 1943 to 1946 he served in the US Navy and played various instruments in the 13th Naval District Admiral's Band in Bremerton, Washington. After his discharge from the Navy, he earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in composition as a student of Roger Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley . 1948–1949 he studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory .

In 1950 Smith returned to New York. There he performed at concerts by the National Orchestral Association and the International Society for Contemporary Music and worked for the Mercury Music Publishing Company . In late 1950 he also became bassoonist with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and played in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra , the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the orchestras of the New York City Ballet and the Chicago Lyric Opera until the mid-1960s .

From 1951-52 Smith worked as Milhaud's assistant at Mills College . He then taught at the University of Chicago . In 1958 he went to Stanford University , where he taught composition, musicology and computer music until his retirement in 1992. He began working with computer generated sounds in the 1960s, and was one of the founders of the Stanford Center for Computer Research and Musical Acoustics (CCRMA) led by John Chowning and Loren Rush . In 1966 he designed the SCORE program for inputting music into computers, which he developed into a program for printing scores. In 1970, the first printed music made with SCORE appeared, and the Handbook of Harmonic Analysis , published in 1979, was the first book whose printed music was made with SCORE.

Between 1940 and 1970 Smith was also active as a composer. During this time u. a. an opera (based on a libretto by EE Cummings ), orchestral works, choral and vocal music as well as numerous chamber music and solo pieces. His works have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra , the Orchestra of America and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and in Athens, Belgrade, Paris, London, Chicago and Taipei. His students include a. the composers William Bolcom and David Lang .

Web links

• Naxos - Leland Smith
• Stanford University - Stanford Report, January 10, 2014: Stanford Professor Leland Smith, innovative music creator, dies at 88
• Computer Music Journal, Vol. 38 No. 2, News: Leland Smith