About the Author

Carl Smith is currently Senior Lecturer in Music Theory and Composition, Organ and Harpsichord at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, a position he has held since 1998. In addition to core courses in music theory and private studio lessons, Smith teaches upper-level composition courses in counterpoint according to sixteenth-century principles, choral composition, historical keyboard literature, and a unique course dealing with historical traditions in the composition and performance of music.

Long involved with the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in 2006 Smith released the CD Tudor Organ Music (Naxos), the first recording devoted entirely to this complex and extraordinarily sophisticated music. His love of the poetry of the period has resulted in dozens of solo art songs, as well as choral settings of the verse of Wyatt, Herrick, Herbert, Johnson and others. His choral motet “God of Creation” (text by Ambrose of Milan) was chosen for performance for Pope John Paul II, and his Lavender Fields: Renata’s Requiem to poems of Czeslaw Milosz was first performed in 1996 with the distinguished poet participating in the concert.

Smith’s involvement, over more than thirty years, with the writings of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti has resulted in musical settings, for a variety of forces, of more than forty of the artist’s poems and letters, most in his own translations. Annual visits to Italy for concerts and musical research were eventually combined with extensive archival study of the autographs of Michelangelo’s poems and letters. In 2014, after almost seven years’ work, his book What’s in a Name? Michelangelo and the Art of Signature was published by The K Press.