Linda Catlin Smith

Linda Catlin Smith was born in New York, and lives in Toronto. She began her composition studies in high school in NY, with composer Allen Shawn, and continued her music study at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1977, she traveled to Canada to study composition and theory with composers Rudolf Komorous, Martin Bartlett, John Celona, Michael Longton and Jo Kondo at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. As a performer, she studied piano with Nurit Tilles and Gilbert Kalish at SUNY/Stony Brook, and with Kathleen Solose in Victoria, where she also studied harpsichord with Erich Schwandt. She moved to Toronto in 1981, where she co-presented, with painter Anna-Marie Cobbold, a new music series at Mercer Union Gallery. In 1986, she was invited by Morton Feldman to attend his lectures, as a guest, at SUNY/Buffalo, NY.

Drawn to an ambiguity of harmony and narrative, her work is informed by her deep appreciation of the work of writers and painters, such as Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Joseph Cornell, among many others. Her works have been commissioned and performed by many soloists and ensembles in Canada, the US and abroad, including: BBC Proms (BBC Scottish Orchestra), Victoria, Vancouver and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphonies, Tapestry New Opera Works, Arraymusic, Vancouver New Music, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Societe de Musique Contemporaine du Quebec, Bozzini, Del Sol and Penderecki Quartets, Fibonacci Trio, Duke Trio, Sabat/Clarke Duo, and many soloists including Eve Egoyan, Louis Goldstein, Philip Thomas, Colin Tilney, and others. Her works have been recorded by: Another Timbre, World Edition, Arraymusic, Eve Egoyan, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Barbara Pritchard, Les Coucous Bénévoles, others. Her lecture “Composing Identity: What is a Woman Composer?” is published in Descant Magazine (#107) and Musicworks (#80).

Many of her compositions were supported by commissions through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Laidlaw Foundation. In addition, she was awarded several individual artist grants from the Canada Council. Her work Garland was awarded the Jules Léger prize in 2005. In 1997, she received the prestigious Hunter Foundation Award for Emerging Artists, and in 2003 a Chalmers Fellowship. She has created several of her works while in residence at the Leighton Studios of the Banff Centre for the Arts. In addition to her work as an independent composer, she was Artistic Director of Arraymusic, one of Toronto’s major contemporary music ensembles, from 1988 to 1993. She was a founding member of the multidisciplinary performance collective, Urge, (1992-2006). She has taught composition privately and at Wilfrid Laurier University (1999-present).

Biography taken from composer’s website.
Photo: Claire Harvie