composer

Ronald Bruce Smith is a composer whose works often integrate acoustic instruments and electronics. Many of his works share a contemplative character, a preoccupation with enhancing the resonance of a given ensemble, and an openness to new sound sources including non-Western ones.

Ronald Bruce Smith is a composer whose works often integrate acoustic instruments and electronics. Many of his works share a contemplative character, a preoccupation with enhancing the resonance of a given ensemble, and an openness to new sound sources including non-Western ones.

Smith’s music has been described as "fresh and lustrous" (The New York Times); "seductive and unique" (Ottawa Citizen); "filling in silences blank canvas with the delicacy of an impressionist’s brush" (Vancouver Sun); "wonderfully evocative"; and "intriguing, lovely and seductive" (San Francisco Chronicle); "a highly charged sonic space, fresh and enigmatic" (Los Angeles Times); "sophisticated and ambitious – fascinating and satisfying" (San Francisco Classical Voice); and as "showing a remarkable sensitivity to tone colors" (Toronto Globe and Mail).

He has received commissions funded by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundations, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Manhattan School of Music, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and CNMAT, University of California, Berkeley. In 2013, he was awarded a fellowship in composition from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Smith has been a featured composer at Other Minds 12 in San Francisco, the 2003 Festival de Nuevos Enfoques y Expresiones en Composition y Tecnologia at Cenart in Mexico City, the Festival of the Sound, Open Ears and the Banff Festival of the Arts.

Continuum, Arraymusic, the Del Sol String Quartet, Stenberg/Zimmermann Duo, Laura Carmichael and the Evergreen Club Gamelan have recorded his music to CDs on Other Minds Records, Karnatic Labs Records and Artifact Music.

Performances

Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | October 12, 2014
Moonshine Room at Club Café | April 30, 2012

News and Press

[Concert Review] Fuse Concert Review: Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Surround Sound at Jordan Hall

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) opened their season on Sunday afternoon with a typically generous and curious program, highlighting music for orchestra and electronics. Perhaps the most impressive takeaway – aside from the rich, musical diversity the afternoon’s three selections showcased – were the often almost imperceptible ways in which composers Ronald Bruce Smith, Anthony Paul de Ritis, and David Felder integrated the electronic and acoustic elements in their music.

The Arts Fuse Full review
[Concert Review] Rose, BMOP present electronically enhanced music at Jordan

Some instruments, once you’ve glimpsed them, stay with you. I’ll never forget my brief encounter with the emormous, room-filling RCA Mark II synthesizer, the first of its kind, built in the 1950s and bursting with period charisma, thanks to its towering stacks of vacuum-tube components and endless rows of knobs and dials. Its aura was so redolent of the early-Cold War era, it seemed that if composers like Milton Babbitt and Vladimir Ussachevsky had not kept it so busy, then maybe, just maybe, we might have beaten the Soviets into space.

The Boston Globe Full review
[Concert Review] Surrounded! De Ritis premiere reverberates at BMOP’s plugged-in opener

The best music deal in town this holiday weekend might have been “Surround Sound,” the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s concert Sunday afternoon at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.

Boston Classical Review Full review