Leading PhD Student Seminar on “Creativity, Inspiration, and the Practice of Composition”
“For all the minimalism of his sound, Smith has turned out to be a maximalist in his ambitions, evolving into one of our most powerful storytellers, an heir to American chroniclers like Charles Ives and Ornette Coleman…” – Adam Shatz, The New York Review of Books
“Wadada Leo Smith has played an outsize role in American experimental music for the last 50 years.” – Seth Colter Walls, New York Times
Groundbreaking trumpeter/composer and musical pioneer Wadada Leo Smith has been appointed by Harvard University as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music. Smith is teaching a weekly seminar to PhD students titled “Creativity, Inspiration and the Practice of Composition.”
During the seminar, students will listen to and study works by contemporary composers. Among the featured composers and works are Anthony Braxton’s Three Compositions of New Jazz (1968); For Alto (1971); Composition 113 (1984); his opera Trillium J. (2016); and Six Compositions (GTM) (2001). Students will also study Carla Bley’s 1971 triple LP Escalator over the Hill; Keith Jarrett’s 1975 album The Koln Concert (1975) and Sapporo, Pr. 1 from Sun Bear (video performance); and Wadada Leo Smith’s String Quartets Nos. 1–12 (seven CD set, 2022) and Ten Freedom Summers (four CD set, 2012).
“I’m happy to be working with these excellent PhD candidates at Harvard this spring,” says Smith. “I’m excited by the creative, inspirational pathways we can release as we dive into this transcendent canon of music by some of music’s most visionary creators.”
Wadada Leo Smith
Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world’s most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America’s National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12.
A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience,” the UCLA Medal, the University’s highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists’ USA Fellow and has also been named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Smith has earned the #1 spot in DownBeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll as Composer of the Year, Jazz Artist and Trumpeter of the Year, and the Jazz Journalists Association has honored Smith as their Musician of the Year, Composer of the Year and Trumpeter of the Year, as well as Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer.
Smith is the creator of Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians which has played a significant role in his development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator. His Ankhrasmation language scores have been exhibited in major American museums including The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Hammer Museum and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. His compositions have been performed by contemporary music ensembles worldwide. For over two decades he has has been creating music for multiple ensembles, including works that take several days to perform.
An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and masterclasses worldwide.
 | Wadada Leo Smith Spring 2024 Press Release | 79 KB |