Leland Smith

Leland Clayton Smith was born in Oakland, California in 1925 and died in Palo Alto, CA in 2013. A musician, teacher and computer scientist, he taught at Stanford University for 34 years, and developed the music engraving tool SCORE.[1]

Career

Showing an early interest in music, after four years of initial study with local teachers he took private lessons in counterpoint, orchestration and composition with Darius Milhaud, who lived near the Smith family. Smith continued studying with Milhaud for two years till he was old enough to join the United States Navy in 1943.[2]

On leaving the Navy in 1946 he studied for a baccalaureate and master's degree in composition under Roger Sessions at University of California, Berkeley, and then went to Paris to study under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire in 1948-9.[1]

Returning to America, he worked predominantly as a bassoonist in New York, but also took occasional work with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and New York City Ballet. He also assisted Milhaud as a teaching assistant at Mills College from 1951-2. Accepting a teaching position at University of Chicago in 1952, Smith taught there till 1958 when he moved to the teaching and research position at Stanford University which lasted till his retirement in 1992.[1]

After six years of teaching harmonic analysis and composition at Stanford, Smith won a Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year in Paris. Returning to Stanford in 1965, Smith joined in the work done by John Chowning, Max Mathews, John Pierce and David Poole on computer synthesized music. In 1966 Smith developed an input syntax for MUSIC V that he called SCORE to enable music to be entered more accurately and efficiently into the new MUSIC V system that the team were developing. This was developed into the independent program he called MS which was the first computer music typesetting program, and which was further developed into the SCORE program.[2]

Retiring in 1992, Smith continued to develop SCORE and was an enthusiastic supporter of the local donkey sanctuary till his death on 13 December 2013.[1]

Books
  • Handbook of Harmonic Analysis. San Andreas Press. 1979. Notable as the first music book typeset entirely by computer.[2]

Further reading

References
  1. Wander, Robin (10 January 2014). "Stanford Professor Leland Smith, innovative music creator, dies at 88". Stanford Report. Stanford University. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
  2. Selfridge-Field, Eleanor (Summer 2014). "Leland Smith (1925-2013)". Computer Music Journal. 38 (2): 5–7. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
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