Guided Listening | Gabriella Smith ZOFO: Mancora to Huaraz
For our final guided listening, we will explore the life and work of Gabriella Smith. Make sure you attend one of our concerts starting next week!
Gabriella Smith was born in San Francisco and has gone on to achieve momentous success as a composer and climate activist. Her recent concerto, Lost Coast was premiered in 2023 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gabriel Cabezas under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel.
For our introduction to Gabriella Smith’s music, I’ve chosen to present this piece for Fourhand Piano. To me, this is the perfect distillation of Smith’s writing in that it juxtaposes an array of percussive textures with a simple musical motif. In this way, it’s an expansion of many of her minimalist compositional predecessors like John Cage and Steve Reich.
In your listening, try to notice the way the piano’s left hand movement is expanded and contracted against the ostinato (repetition) of the percussion.
The piece mentioned above, Lost Coast, is another example of Smith’s writing joining minimalist techniques and aesthetics with spectral writing– meaning that within one piece, one experiences a pattern not only as a bare presentation of the pattern but also as a component of a larger texture.
In listening to this piece, I always notice the striking raw quality of textures Smith asks for: in this case, it is in the gritty tone of the cello and folk-style singing in the vocals. The introduction of these sounds in classical music is very subversive, especially as classical technique often favors a more polished and refined tone production.
This marks the end of our guided listening previews for Fascinating Rhythms! We hope to see you in person for the full presentation of our program! Thanks for tuning in ;-)
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