As its first Composer Lab & Workshop Fellow, the Nashville Symphony named Gabriella Smith to return several times next year to work with music director Giancarlo Guerrero and the orchestra. As part of her fellowship, Smith’s original composition, “Tumblebird Contrails” will be performed in 2016 by the Symphony as part of its Aegis Sciences Classical Series.
As one of five young American composers, (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPV7zd0tLWk) who were invited to Nashville earlier this month to participate in the Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab & Workshop, an intensive three-day program designed to educate emerging composers on every facet of working with a major American orchestra, Giancarlo Guerrero said, “Over the course of just a few short days during this workshop, Gabriella Smith established herself as a unique talent with incredible potential and an eagerness to learn; precisely the type of young, promising composer that this initiative was designed to discover. Smith’s music is bold, original and suggests exciting new directions for American music in the 21st century. We are thrilled to welcome her to the Nashville Symphony family.”
About
Gabriella Smith, (www.gabriellasmith.com) is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and a 2015/16 ArtistYear Fellow and a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she is dedicating a citizen-artist year of national service in the Philadelphia region.
Her music has been performed throughout the United States and internationally by eighth blackbird, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, PRISM Quartet, Aizuri Quartet and Ensemble39, among many others. The recipient of the 2014 ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award, three ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2009, 2013, 2015) and the Theodore Presser Foundation Music Award (2012), she earned the First Place Prize in the 2009 Pacific Musical Society Composition Competition.