Carl Smith

Carl Smith (b. 1949) studied early keyboard music in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt and has focused extensively on the music of early English and Italian keyboard composers. His 2006 recording "Tudor Organ Music" (Naxos) was the first recording devoted entirely to that repertoire. He has served on the faculty of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University where he has taught music theory, composition, organ, and harpsichord. As a composer, Smith has focused especially on settings of texts by the Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarrotti. He has composed more than forty settings of Michelangelo's poems and letters for a variety of forces. Intense involvement with the artist's writings led to a lengthy study of the unrecognized calligraphic word-play in his signatures and, ultimately, to the publication of a book on the subject, What's in a Name? Michelangelo and the Art of Signature (The K Press, 2014). Smith has also written instrumental works as well as numerous vocal and choral works to the words of other poets, including Wyatt, Herrick, Herbert, Johnson, and Milosz.