Gabriella Smith


Gabriella Smith is an American composer from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Life

Smith was born in Berkeley, California. As a teenager, she was very interested in biology, ecology, and conservation, and she spent five years volunteering on a songbird research project in Point Reyes, California.
Smith began learning the violin at age seven and began composing soon thereafter. Later, she was mentored by John Adams as a part of his Young Composers Program in Berkeley. She received her Bachelors of Music in composition from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2013, and was an ArtistYear fellow there during the 2015-16 season. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and has been living in Marseille, France since 2017.
In her free time, Smith enjoys hiking, backpacking, birding, playing capoeira, and making underwater recordings with a hydrophone.

Performances

Smith's works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Roomful of Teeth, Eighth Blackbird, Bang on a Can All Stars, the Nashville Symphony, YMusic, the Aizuri Quartet, the Dover Quartet, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the PRISM Quartet, and others.
Her piece Tumblebird Contrails was commissioned by the Pacific Harmony Foundation and premiered in 2014 by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop. In January 2019, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by John Adams, performed the piece as part of its centennial season.
Her string quartet Carrot Revolution was written in 2015 for the Aizuri Quartet, having been commissioned by the Barnes Foundation for their exhibition The Order of Things. In November 2019, it was performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic as a part of their Green Umbrella concert series.
The Curtis Symphony Orchestra commissioned a work from Smith, set to be performed on its domestic tour in January–February 2020, culminating in a performance in Carnegie Hall.
Smith's 2019 composition "Bioluminescence Chaconne" had its world premiere with the Oregon Symphony in Portland on February 8, 2020.

Awards

Smith is a recipient of a BMI Student Composer Award, the ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award, and three ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. She has also won the American Modern Ensemble Ninth Annual Composition Competition, the Theodore Presser Foundation Music Award, and the First Place Prize in the 2009 Pacific Musical Society Composition Competition.

Works

Orchestral