Bioluminescence Chaconne
Gabriella Smith was born in Berkeley, California, on December 26, 1991, and lives in the Seattle area. She wrote Bioluminescence Chaconne in 2019 on a commission from the Oregon Symphony, which gave the premiere under Carlos Kalmar’s direction in February 2020.
The score of Bioluminescence Chaconne calls for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (E-flat clarinet optional), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani (with temple bowl or crotale), percussion (I. temple bowl, bass drum; II. crotale, tom-toms, kick drum; III. 5-ish metal objects with varying degrees of resonance (e.g. tin cans, mixing bowls, cowbells), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Gabriella Smith has combined deep interests in music, science, and the natural world literally since she was a child. She began violin and piano lessons at age 8 and started composing around the same time. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and at age 12 began volunteering at a research station in Point Reyes, aiding biologists in their study of bird populations. A fascination with problem-solving and its tools reveals itself not only in the music she writes, but in an ongoing interest in math and her work as an activist to catalyze action to combat climate change. Her pursuits in activism and in music are integral to one another. Importantly, while Smith recognizes the significance of the challenges of climate change, she maintains a real sense of joy and poetic playfulness in her work.
Smith, who strongly identifies with the West Coast, was fortunate to gain a mentor in the composer John Adams, who, though originally from Massachusetts, has been a Bay Area resident for more than 50 years. As a teenager, Smith was part of Adams’s Young Composers Program, and Adams has continued to follow and support her career even as she has earned an international reputation. He has conducted her Tumblebird Contrails with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and her Lost Roads with the New York Philharmonic.
Smith chose the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia for her advanced formal training before moving back to the West Coast; she is currently based in Seattle. At Curtis, she met one of her most important and longstanding collaborators, the cellist Gabriel Cabezas, for whom she wrote the cello and electronics piece Lost Coast. She expanded the piece for a major commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Cabezas, who premiered it under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction in 2023. She completed two major orchestral works in 2025: Rewilding, premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s direction in one of his final concerts as the orchestra’s music director, and a violin concerto, How to Be a Bird, composed for Pekka Kuusisto and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Salonen also conducted Tumblebird Contrails as part of the Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in 2023 and led the premiere of her organ concerto Breathing Forests, another Los Angeles Philharmonic commission, with soloist James McVinnie in 2022. Smith’s work has also been commissioned for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the Dover String Quartet; the Kronos Quartet, and the mixed ensemble yMusic, among others.
Speaking of her working methods in interviews, Smith has explained that her own experience and experimentation as a violinist helped clarify the extended technique string parts in her music. She records gestures and sounds and devises clear and practical notation after the fact. For other parts, she sings or uses whatever percussion might be handy to make layered recordings. She has used mathematical functions as a tool to illustrate, playfully, the large-scale form of her pieces: one such work is titled with the calculus function f(x)=sin2x-1/x, a segment of which reflects the work’s trajectory of intensity. Although such tools are embedded in her process, nature, the earth and its processes, and the specter of human-caused climate change are her constant wellspring of inspiration. In an interview about her work, she encapsulated her aesthetic impulse:
The destruction of our biosphere is the biggest issue facing humans and all species on Earth right now, so for me it would be impossible not to address this in my work. On a more personal level, I have always loved spending time in nature, hiking and observing and getting to know the organisms around me, so it is inevitable that my music is inspired by it as well.
Like several others of her pieces, including Tumblebird Contrails and her cello concerto Lost Coast, Bioluminescence Chaconne was inspired by the composer’s direct engagement with nature. The Chaconne is a musical response to the composer’s memory of a scuba diving excursion as part of a marine biology program in the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.
Bioluminescence is a property of living things causing them to glow in our perception; the glowing beings in this case are plankton, whose light is produced through chemical reaction. A chaconne is an old form, common in the Baroque era, that characteristically employs a repeated harmonic progress or bass line. One of the most famous of these is the chaconne in Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin. Smith recognizes that musical form and natural processes can share certain similarities of growth and change. In her unconventional chaconne, the underlying repeated progression gets shorter and shorter until it virtually disappears before expanding again. Using all the forces of a large orchestra, the piece begins in a high register and gradually fills out toward the bass, becoming darker as it gains energy. Bioluminescence Chaconne’s sustained, shimmering, evolving, layered textures evoke the constant visual, tactile, and sonic stimuli one experiences under water, at the same time displaying a virtuosic sense of orchestral color and vibrancy.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.