Adirondack Daily Enterprise, July 21, 2016
Born: August 21, 1931
Died: July 12, 2016, age 84
Married: Rosalind Rees
Children: Darin Deterra and Rachel Sapyta
Gregg Smith, composer and director of choral music, founded the summer Adirondack Festival of American Music, headquartered in Saranac Lake, in 1973, and directed it for more than thirty years. An obituary appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, July 17, 2016.
Another article, titled "Gregg Smith, Choral Leader Who Elevated Standards, Dies at 84," also appeared in the New York Times, on July 15, 2016.
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Jul 21, 2016
Choral Music Master Dies
Locals mourn the death of composer, conductor Gregg Smith
A world-renowned choral conductor and composer who brought a top-tier music festival here every summer for more than 30 years has died.
Gregg Smith died Tuesday, June 12, in Bronxville, near his home in Yonkers, at the age of 84. His cause of death was a heart attack, but he had been ill for several years with complications from diabetes, according to his wife, the soprano Rosalind (Rees) Smith.
"I was with him when he died and actually sang 'Now I Walk in Beauty' to him, which is one of his pieces that everyone who was ever in any one of his workshops learned," Smith said. "I thought it was a good way to send him off to heaven to take care of those angel choirs."
For 34 years, Smith organized the Adirondack Festival of American Music, a mainstay of the Adirondack summer music scene that brought acclaimed singers, composers, and musicians to the area. His own Gregg Smith Singers performed a dozen or more concerts during their annual "summer vacation" in the Adirondacks, starting each year with an Independence Day performance in Riverside Park. The festival also engaged local residents through voice training workshops, a community chorus and a children's choir.
"For people who like to sing, it gave them a wonderful opportunity, but for all the rest of us, it gave us the opportunity to hear marvelous music," said Nancy Murphy of Vermontville, a close friend of the Smiths who worked as the festival's publicist.
Smith founded the Gregg Smith Singers in 1955 in Los Angeles, when he was a graduate student at UCLA. He led the professional vocal ensemble for more than 50 years, traveling the world through festivals, tours and residencies. The group recorded more than 100 albums, and Smith was a three-time Grammy award winner. The Singers' repertoire included many premiers of contemporary works, as well as revivals of early American music. Smith collaborated with some of the most influential composers and conductors of the 20th Century, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky, with whom he had a close friendship. Smith was also a prolific composer with more than 400 choral, orchestral, theater, and chamber works to his credit. He received numerous National Endowment for the Arts grants and composed many commissioned works, the biggest of which was the William Strickland commission for his 1997 "Earth Requiem."
"His dedication to the American Music of his own time was unparalleled," Dennis Keene, the artistic director of the Voices of Ascension Chorus and Orchestra, and an organist with the Gregg Smith Singers, told The New York Times in an obituary published last week. "It is no exaggeration to say that he did more than anyone to promote and support contemporary American choral composition.
The Smiths' introduction to the Adirondacks came in 1971 when Rosalind Smith filled in for a singer who was supposed to perform in Lake Placid but had taken ill. "I remember doing a concert in church in Lake Placid, and my husband came along to support me," she said. "George Reynolds was music director of North Country Community College at the time, and he knew of Gregg Smith and the Singers, and he said 'I wish we could get the Singers here next year,' and that's kind of the way it started." The Singers stayed and rehearsed at Paul Smith's College in their first summer here, 1973, but the festival's base eventually shifted to North Country Community College in Saranac Lake. The Singers performed in churches and other venues, primarily in Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, but also in other communities around the Park. The Smiths eventually bought a camp near the Lower Locks on the Saranac River, where they would spend their summers.
"We were kind of itinerant musicians in the summertime before that," Rosalind Smith recalled. "We'd do a week in Cleveland, Ohio, and there was somebody who hired us along the Mississippi River one summer. But after the festival began, we started turning down those jobs and just concentrated on the Adirondacks. It grew from about a two week thing to four or at most five weeks. Gregg would do conducting workshops. He brought an orchestra up for 10 or 15 years, and we started to record in the Petrova (Elementary school auditorium) because the acoustics were so good there. We simply fell in love with the area. We call it God's country. And there are a lot of very musical people up there."
Some local residents got to work closely with the Gregg Smith Singers through a 40-person community chorus Smith led. Beryl Szwed of Saranac Lake sang in the group starting in the early 1980s. "The (Gregg Smith) Singers were amazing people," she said. "They gave us voice lessons and helped us to become better singers. It was a very intense level of a performance. He caused us to really reach." Szwed said the community chorus made several recordings over the years with top-name composers and musicians that Smith brought to Saranac Lake. "When you get to be able to say, 'Yeah, I was a backup singer for Dave Brubeck,' it's like 'Whoa!' Not a lot of people can say that." Brubeck, the pianist and band leader whose "Take Five" was the biggest-selling jazz single ever, performed with his quartet, the Gregg Smith Singers, and the community chorus in July 1992 in St. Bernard's Catholic Church. Helen Demong, a longtime music teacher and choral director at Saranac Lake High School, also sang in the community chorus. "When you first met (Smith), you couldn't help but feel intimidated," Demong said. "Here's this world-class conductor and composer. He'd make every single person in the community chorus stand up and sing a scale all by themselves. Once you got to know him, you realized he was just so passionate about his craft, that's just the way he worked."
"How grateful I am to have that experience of working with somebody who called me by my first name," Szwed said. "This man was an idol to me. He won Grammys. He was known throughout the world, yet he knew me. I'm still in awe that I had the experience of working with him."
Another staple of the festival was a children's choir , featuring local kids, that rehearsed for two weeks and performed with the Gregg Smith Singers and the community chorus. "All of my kids went through it." Szwed said. Funds raised from concerts and donations were used to award scholarships to local kids who otherwise couldn't afford to participate in the children's choir. Smith also got involved in the Saranac Lake High School music program through Demong. In 1996, she asked him to write an Adirondack folk song for her high school choir. "The was at a Tuesday rehearsal," she said. "Our next rehearsal was Thursday. When he saw me then, he came running up to me so excited and said 'I'm going to do a folk orchestra opera.' I was frozen in my spot, like 'Really?' But he had my students write a libretto. I would send the lyrics to him, and he would write the music and send it back to me. We performed it, and it completely took the schoo lcommunity and the people that came by storm." Demong and others said Smith's Adirondack Festival helped contribute to a passion for choral music in the community that continues to this day through groups like Demong's Northern Lights Choir, Adirondack Singers, the Saranac Lake High School's acclaimed choral music program, now led by Drew Benware, and Benware's Northern Adirondack Vocal Ensemble. "The community continues to recognize the value of music in the lives of our students and community as a whole," Benware said.
The festival's last summer in Saranac Lake was 2007. Smith's health contributed to the decision to end it, Rosalind Smith said. "It was also a matter of the landscape of things changing," she said. "We just weren't getting as many children in the children's choir, everything cost more than it used to, and it was hard to find the money to do it. It was just time to stop." Summers in the Adirondacks haven't been the same since, Murphy said. "We miss them," she said. "I'm sure the whole community misses them. There's no way to replace the Adirondack Festival of American Music."
Szwed said she heard about Smith's death on Facebook. "We had known he was very ill, but when it happens, you're still in shock," she said. "You just want these people to go on and on." Demong said she plans to have the Northern Lights Choir perform some of Smith's work at its spring concert next year. She plans to invite former children's choir members back to participate. "In the place that he loved to spend his summers, we'd like to honor him here," she said. Rosalind Smith said she and her husband haven't been able to come up to their camp since 2013, due to Gregg's health, but she plans to visit it sometime next month. "I want to sprinkle Gregg's ashes there," she said. "It's my favorite place on earth, and I know it was his, too."
