Stuart Saunders Smith

Stuart Saunders Smith (b. Portland, Maine, United States, March 16, 1948) is a notable and widely performed American composer, percussionist, and poet. He was born in Portland, Maine and grew up in Portland and central Maine, to a family that had originally come from central Maine.

He studied with Edward Diemente at the Hartt School of Music. In 1977, he received a DMA in composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his instructors included Edward Miller (American composer), Salvatore Martirano, Herbert Brün, and Ben Johnston. He teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has also taught at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He served as executive editor of the Percussive Arts Research Edition from 1982 to 1984.

His wife is the percussionist and music publisher Sylvia Smith, who has performed many of his works. They live together in Baltimore, Maryland. His works are published by Smith Publications.

Smith describes himself as "a confessional composer who focuses on revealing in his music the most personal aspects of his life, in the belief that the revelations of the particular speak to the universal." His music is usually chromatic, atonal, and rhythmically complex, with his pitch material selected in an intuitive manner rather than via the twelve-tone technique. Many of his works are theatrical, asking the performers to speak, sing, act, and perform pantomime in addition to playing their instruments. His works often feature improvisation. Approximately half of his more than 130 works involve percussion, and his works are particularly popular among percussionists. He has a preference for found sounds, and often utilizes household objects (such as plates, bowls, and tin cans) and objects found in nature (such as dried leaves, logs, and pod rattles) as sound sources. Many of his works are inspired by the environment and history of Maine, including ...And Points North (1990), which is about the Passamaquoddy nation of eastern Maine.

Recordings of Smith's music have been released on the 11 West, Capstone, Centaur, Opus One, O.O. Discs, Cadenza, BVHaast, and GAC Sweden labels. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council.

His 60th birthday was celebrated with concerts on March 7 and September 22, 2008, at the University of Akron.