Gabriella Smith (born 1991)
Gabriella Smith was born in Berkeley, California. She received a Bachelors of Music in composition from the Curtis Institute of Music, and attended Princeton University as a graduate student. She currently lives in Seattle.
Gabriella Smith has composed music for orchestras, vocal ensembles, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments. Judging from the number of YouTube performances, her Carrot Revolution (2015) is quite popular among string quartets, and these videos make it easy to see why.
Her website states:
Whether for orchestras, chamber ensembles, voices, or electronics, Gabriella’s music comes from a love of play, exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world.
Many of Gabriella’s works address the climate crisis and participation in climate solutions. Through her music, she often tries to provide listeners with an emotional connection to the natural world in an invitation to action.
This is the case with Requiem, a 2018 composition for 8 singers and string quartet whose text consists of a list of the Latin names of species that have become extinct in the last 100 years.
Hexacorallia is another 2018 composition, this one for string orchestra, that in inspired by a series of underwater recordings that the composer made in the coral reefs of French Polynesia:
She writes:
Most people think of the ocean as a silent place, but in reality it is incredibly noisy and vibrant with many species making sound just as we do on the surface.... The piece is filled with these popping, creaking, crunching, and grunting sounds, but my overall goal was not to simply transcribe this soundscape but also to capture that glorious feeling of awe and wonder at dropping my hydrophone down into the water and hearing for the first time this completely new sound world.
But it certainly gets kind of crazy in spots, as if this deep-sea advanture is exploring more than just sound!