Stuart Saunders Smith

He received his DMA in music composition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1977, where he studied under Herbert Brün, Salvatore Martirano, and Benjamin Johnston.

[2][3] Alongside Newcomb, his other percussion teachers included Fred Budha, Al Dawson, Alexander Lepak, and Thomas Siwe.

[4] Smith's percussion-theater music forms the core of that literature with notable pieces includingPoems I II III, ...And Points North, Tunnels, Clay Singing and twenty-six compositions of that genre.

Part I of this book was published in The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist, edited by Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar (Routledge, 2014).

When Smith chose the title "Links" for his ongoing series of compositions for vibraphone, he provided us with the most suggestive mode of biographical entry and subsequent inquiry, for his links are not only intra- and inter-compositional, but between and among his vocations as composer, performer, teacher, writer, anthologist, editor, entrepreneur, philomath, and musical activist.

For he has forged a personalized seamless musical compound, a vast collection of awarenesses fused into a unified, single, and singular vision in which the individual sources retain little of their literal characteristics.

(Milton Babbitt, quoted in Welsh 1995, p. [page needed]) Smith has done very important and unique work in the fields of open-form composition and jazz.

He comes to this approach naturally, for two reasons: first, as a percussionist he is comfortable with notation which diverges from the traditional mainstream in a number of ways; and second, as a jazz performer he is at home with improvisation.