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Leland Smith (1925–2013)

Leland Clayton Smith, a pioneer of music notation software, died on 17 December 2013 at the age of 88. As a child, from the age of eleven, he took a serious interest in music. After four years of piano and wind lessons, he benefited from the proximity of Darius Milhaud, a recent (1940) émigré who joined the music faculty at Mills College (at that time an all-female institution) near the Smith family home in Oakland, California. Leland studied counterpoint, orchestration, and composition privately with Milhaud from 1941 to 1943, when he turned 18 and joined the U.S. Navy. During his service, which continued into 1946, he was stationed mainly in Bremerton, Washington. Playing six instruments, Leland enriched the 13th Naval District Admiral’s Band with his versatility.

After his discharge, Leland matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley. There he completed both a baccalaureate and a master’s degree in composition in less than three years. The fabled harmony and composition seminars of Roger Sessions left lasting impressions, as did a strong cohort of fellow students, among them Leon Kirchner and also Jeanne Bamberger, who became a lifelong friend of both Leland and his wife Edith.

Leland studied composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire in 1948–1949. He initially settled in New York, working mainly as a bassoonist, but interleaved invitations from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra (1950) with engagements with the San Francisco Symphony and the New York City Ballet. He assisted Milhaud at Mills (1951–1952). These various activities were terminated by an offer from the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1952 until, in 1958, he was hired by Stanford University. During his Chicago years, Leland worked with the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony.

Throughout his tenure at Stanford (which continued officially until his retirement in 1992) Smith taught harmonic analysis and composition. In 1963, he developed his own textbook, which was not initially published. Countless Smith pupils (41 of whom received advanced degrees from Stanford) recall their teacher in superlatives. In 1979 the printed Handbook of Harmonic Analysis became the first book containing music to be entirely typeset by computer, using Leland’s notation software. This achievement was facilitated by the software’s auxiliary drawing program (inspired by Edith’s needs as an artist), which enabled the user to interleave text, notation, and graphics.

After six years at Stanford, Leland was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (1964–1965), which enabled him and his family (by then including three children) to spend a year in Paris. While he was gone, his student John Chowning immersed himself in the possibilities of computer music as described by Max Mathews at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. Chowning recalls that Leland encouraged this deviation from the academic norm. “Do it,” Leland said, “but promise that you will teach me all that you learn when I return.”

Chowning did just that. Well steeped in Music IV, which he had learned under the guidance of Max Mathews and John Pierce, Chowning explained how the process of generating music electronically involved typing lists of data to feed parameters for unit generators into a computer. David Poole, a young researcher, had already rewritten Music IV in DEC PDP-10 assembly language and called the new version Music 10.

Leland learned how to use Music 10 within a few days. Chowning showed him the program and gave him a FORTRAN manual so that he could work on it. Leland mastered the principles of programming quickly but found typing lists of data cumbersome. In 1966 he devised a music-input language, SCORE, to take the drudgery out of the process. It represented “a great advance in ‘computer music,’ which is what we called our medium,” says Chowning. At that time SCORE ran only on the DEC PDP-10s, but the availability of an input system attracted both composers and students.

The original SCORE served as a preprocessor for a sound-synthesis language, but Leland soon focused on an auxiliary system called MS for typesetting conventional scores. The first output from his notation program, which we now know as SCORE, appeared in 1970. An early example...