Lucas Marshall Smith, Editor-in-Chief, SEAMUS Newsletter

Lucas Marshall Smith is a composer, performer, and educator who engages with solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic music. 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.

Always anxious to collaborate with new musicians, Smith has received premieres and commissions from ensembles and music organizations including the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective (C4), ensemble loadbang, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, the Heartland Sings chorale, and ensemble mise-en. Smith’s music has enjoyed performances at festivals and conferences such as the Toronto International Electroacoustic Music Symposium (TIES), the SCI Student National Conference, the RED NOTE New Music Festival, the Pellegrini Festival of New Music, the SEAMUS National Conference, EMM, and NSEME. Additionally, Smith’s music has received accolades from the American Prize and the ASCAP Foundation. Some of his works are recorded on music from SEAMUS Volume 28 and the RMN Classical music label.

Smith received his D.M.A. and M.M. in Music Composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his B.M. in Music Composition and Music Education from Bowling Green State University. 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.