Tumblebird Contrails

Composition and premiere: Gabriella Smith wrote Tumblebird Contrails in 2014 on a commission from the Pacific Harmony Foundation (John Adams and Deborah O’Grady) for the 2014 Cabrillo Festival. Marin Alsop led the premiere with the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra on August 9, 2014. First BSO performance: July 13, 2025, Thomas Adès conducting, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

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 working 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 Composer’s 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. A current project for that orchestra is a new work for violin and orchestra for soloist Pekka Kuusisto.

In addition to Dudamel and Adams, Smith’s music has been championed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, who led Tumblebird Contrails as part of the Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in 2023. He led the premiere of her Rewilding, a San Francisco Symphony commission, with the ensemble last month as part of one of his final concerts as the orchestra’s music director. Salonen 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. Smith’s music is featured on Tanglewood’s 2025 Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra performs her Bioluminescence Chaconne under Anna Handler’s direction in February 2026.

Smith has explained aspects of her working methods in interviews. As a violinist, she frequently relies on her own experience and experimentation with her instrument to create the extended technique string parts in her music, recording gestures and arriving at a 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 these tools are embedded in her music, 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 summarized this 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.

Energetic, intricate, colorful, grooving and chaotic, Tumblebird Contrails is an early work less explicitly about climate change and more about the ecstasy of our place in the natural world. The composer provided her own explanation of its inspiration and title:

Tumblebird Contrails is inspired by a single moment I experienced while backpacking in Point Reyes, sitting in the sand at the edge of the ocean, listening to the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific (the keening gulls, pounding surf, rush of approaching waves, sizzle of sand and sea foam in receding tides), the constant ebb and flow of pitch to pitchless, tune to texture, grooving to free-flowing, watching a pair of ravens playing in the wind, rolling, swooping, diving, soaring—imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky. The title, Tumblebird Contrails, is a Kerouac-inspired, nonsense phrase I invented to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.

Gabriella Smith wrote Tumblebird Contrails when she was just 22 on a commission from John Adams’s Pacific Harmony Foundation. Marin Alsop led the premiere at the Cabrillo Festival in 2014, since which time the piece has been performed frequently by orchestras throughout the country.

ROBERT KIRZINGER

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.