Lucas Marshall Smith

Lucas Marshall Smith (b.1989) is an American composer who hails from New London, Ohio. He holds degrees from Bowling Green State University (B.M. 2012) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M.M. 2014). Smith is currently pursuing his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Illinois where he is working as the Operations Assistant in the Experimental Music Studios under the direction of Scott A. Wyatt. During his studies, Smith has also served as choirmaster at the Maumee Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregational Church and as a teaching assistant for Aural Skills and Music Theory courses at the University of Illinois.

Smith writes for a variety of musical styles and genres including experimental art music, music for theatre, and electroacoustic composition. 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. Smith is currently expanding his stage work output with an opera expected to receive its premiere 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 both acoustic and electroacoustic music, Smith has had his music performed at the 30th and 31st Annual SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) National Conferences (2015-16), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2015-16), the 46th Annual Ball State Festival of New Music and the 2016 RED NOTE New Music Festival. Smith has also received premieres and commissions from numerous new music groups including the New York based ensemble loadbang, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, the Heartland Sings chorale, and ensemble mise-en.

Some of Smith’s prominent composition teachers have included Burton Beerman, Carlos Carrillo, Christopher Dietz, Erin Gee, Marilyn Shrude, Stephen Taylor, Reynold Tharp, and electroacoustic studies with Elainie Lillios and Scott A. Wyatt.