Lucas Marshall Smith

Lucas Marshall Smith is a composer, performer, scholar, and educator. His music endeavors to understand the human experience through the lenses of internal/external cognition, identity/representation, religion/spirituality, and tone/noise relationships. His doctoral thesis titled “Representations of Queer Identity in the Opera Fellow Travelers by Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce” reflects some of these interests.

As a classically trained vocalist, Smith’s affinity for vocal lyricism and dramatic tension are two markers of his unique style. These elements are brought to the forefront in his musical “On the Way to Me,” which received a stage reading at Bowling Green State University in 2011, and his one-act opera “A Psalm of Silence,” which was produced by the Lyric Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017.

Smith also highly values timbral exploration and expansion in his music. This interest organically extended into work in the electroacoustic computer music domain—personally recording and manipulating sounds at their most basic level, deconstructing them, and reconstructing them to create entirely new timbres, gestures, and imagined spaces.

Active as a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, Smith has had music performed nationally and internationally. Some recent performances include the Toronto International Electroacoustic Music Symposium (TIES), the International Electroacoustic Music Exhibition (MUSLAB), the RED NOTE New Music Festival, the 46th Annual Pellegrini Festival of New Music, the Society of Composers, Incorporated Student National Conference (SCI), the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States National Conference (SEAMUS), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), the Electronic Music Midwest Conference (EMM), the National Student Electronic Music Event (NSEME), and the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC). Smith has also received premieres and commissions from ensembles and music organizations including the New York-based Choral Composer/Conductor Collective (C4), ensemble loadbang, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, the Heartland Sings chorale, and ensemble mise-en.

Smith’s music has received accolades from the American Prize—2nd place in the opera/theater/film/dance division for “A Psalm of Silence,” and an Honorable Mention for his choral work, “Lux Aeterna,” the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers—a finalist in the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards for his chamber orchestra piece, “…through a glass, darkly…,” and the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective—3rd Place in the IGNITE Commissioning Competition for his choral work, “Hide and Seek.” In addition to release on RMN Records, Smith’s music appears on New Focus Recordings’ “Music from SEAMUS, Vol. 28” and will be included on ABLAZE Records’ “New Choral Voices Vol. 8” compilation in 2026.

Smith holds degrees from Bowling Green State University (B.M. 2012) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M.M. 2014, D.M.A. 2024). Some of his former composition teachers have included Burton Beerman, Carlos Carrillo, Christopher Dietz, Erin Gee, Marilyn Shrude, Reynold Tharp, Stephen Taylor, and electroacoustic studies with Elainie Lillios and Scott A. Wyatt.

For more, visit https://lmsmth10.wixsite.com/lucasmarshallsmith/about