Photo © Jim Newman

Ronald Bruce Smith is a Canadian composer whose works incorporate both acoustic instruments and electronics. Many of Smith’s 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). His Kyrie Eleison, intended as a memorial for the fourteen students murdered at the University of Montreal in December 1989, combines a soprano soloist, orchestra and live electronics in a 'quiet plea for mercy as well as a static prayer for spiritual reflection’. In Meditations, based on research begun at IRCAM and realized at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), Smith manipulates materials drawn from Pakistani vocal music and the Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra).
In works like Remembrances of a Garden for chamber ensemble, timbral variety comes from dramatic articulations and subtle performance techniques. In his chamber work Flux, timbral variety results from a mathematical exploration of tone color based on the imaginative manipulation of harmonic spectra from the overtone series. Smith studied composition at the University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of California at Berkeley from which he received the Ph.D. in music. His principal composition teachers include Tristan Murail, Bruce Mather, Richard Felciano and Talivaldis Kenins, and he has studied computer music and synthesis with David Wessel. Smith has taught at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University; he is currently on faculty at Northeastern University in Boston.
www.ronaldbrucesmith.com