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.