Jordan Smith

Johns Hopkins University

Doctor of Musical Arts - Candidate

Music

Peabody Conservatory.
Student of Gustav Meier

Jordan Smith makes Concert Connections: Musical Palindromes

Conductor Jordan Smith leads Ars Nova Dallas in a 2009 Concert Connection at the The Dallas Festival of Modern Music. Smith discusses palindromes in Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire with the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9YedRudtPM

Baltimore Social Innovation Fellowship

Warnock Foundation

2016-12-01

“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.” The words of William Congreve, often quoted and more often misquoted, still resonate 300 years after they were written, because people still respond to music. They’re often passionate about it. So passionate, they’ll even travel long distances and pay lots of money to hear it.
It’s that passion that Jordan Smith hopes to ignite in audiences in West Baltimore with free concerts by his ensemble, Symphony Number One. Smith is the Founder and Music Director of this chamber orchestra, which has drawn musicians not only from the Peabody Conservatory, where Smith is a PhD candidate, but from across the country.

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The Musico-Linguistics Meme: Recursion and American Academic Inquiry into Musical Meaning since Bernstein in Boston

2012-12-08

Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lecture Series of 1973 have played an critical role in helping to define a particular landscape of thought which might be best described by Bernstein’s own (admittedly nonacademic) term, "musico-linguistics".1 While not a formal discipline, the term characterizes and encompasses the body of thought upon which he speculates in six multi-hour lectures at Harvard. It is important to note from the outset that my research goals were initially designed to document the ways in which a Bernstein’s thesis for a universal musical grammar represented an idiosyncratic musical worldview: fitting in his time but no longer operative in light of more recent discoveries. However, a careful reading of the literature tells a different story. The lectures themselves do not represent rigorous scholarship; however, due to their enormous cultural influence via nationwide broadcast,2 I argue that Bernstein’s perspective as portrayed in The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard went on nonetheless to become a meme that has served to inspire, direct and at times outright define a course of scholarship for many researchers across a diverse range of disciplines. This work continues to yield fruitful discoveries in areas such as the study of recursion.

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