Music Composition: Classical and New Forms
Gary Smart, Ponte Vedra, FL

A unique musician, composer-pianist Gary Smart performs, composes and improvises music that reflects an abiding interest in Americana, world musics and jazz, as well as the western classical tradition. Smart’s background is pluralistic. He studied with composers Yehudi Wyner, Toru Takemitsu and John Corigliano and has worked with new music pianists Robert Miller and Aloys Kontarsky, as well as with jazz composer David Baker and film composer Henry Mancini. Smart studied piano with such diverse figures as Cuban poano virtuoso Jorge Bolet, Yale scholar-keyboardist Ralph Kirkpatrick and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

Smart’s music has been performed in several major venues in the US including the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and New York’s Lincoln Center. An artist with a wide range of constantly developing interests, Dr. Smart has lived and worked in the eastern, Midwestern and western USA as well as in Germany, Japan and Indonesia. His work is published by Margun Music and has been recorded on Mastersound Recordings. “The Major’s Letter,” a CD featuring Gary Smart’s songs for voice and piano, sung by four different singers, each accompanied by the composer, will be released by Albany Records this year.

Smart has received awards for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Music Educators National Conference and from several state arts councils. Other accolades include the Lenard Bernstein Fellowship from the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Yale University’s Horatio Parker Prize and the Fulbright Program’s appellation as a “Distinguished Professor of Music.”

Gary Smart is currently the Yessin Professor of Music at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

To hear Gary's music:

String Quartet, 2005, fourth movement excerpt, Ritz Chamber Players (4:59)

Me and My Song song cycle, "Homesick Blues," Bill Brown, tenor, Gary Smart, piano (3:31)

Alleluias for Symphony Orchestra, excerpt, Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Fabio Mechetti, conductor (4:58)