Isolation

Abstract

The life and work of North American composer Stuart Saunders Smith (1948) have shown features reminiscent of the 19th century philosophical movement known as New England Transcendentalism. Here I discuss how ideas divulged by Transcendentalism and transcendentalist philosophies, in particular oneness, freethinking, anti-materialism, anti-technologism, and silence reflect in Smith’s life stances and compositional process. Based on a belief that oneness binds all living beings via a universal soul, Smith seeks to symbolically unify composer, performer, and audience through the use of silence and a compositional technique called co-existence. In turn, anti-materialism and anti-technologism manifest musically in his frugal use of instrumentation, and in his refusal to write for electronics while evoking naturalistic themes, respectively.