Leland Smith

Leland Clayton Smith (August 6, 1925 – December 17, 2013) was an American musician, teacher and computer scientist. He taught at Stanford University for 34 years, and developed the music engraving tool SCORE.

Career Smith was born in Oakland, California, United States.

On leaving the Navy in 1946, he studied for a baccalaureate and master's degree in composition under Roger Sessions at University of California, Berkeley, and then went to Paris to study under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire in 1948–9.

Smith composed for most of his life. Reviewing Smith's Woodwind Trio in 1974, Richard Swift commented how '...the long arching lines of the Trio, the sensitive and refined shaping of short movements, the twentieth-century Franco-American sonorities of the instruments make a fitting act of homage to Milhaud, but the voice is always Smith's own...'. Reviewing the two motets in 1976, Swift commented that Smith's music 'commands attention by virtue of its imaginative and expressive power and intelligent craft.'

Retiring from Stanford in 1992, Smith continued to develop SCORE and was an enthusiastic supporter of the local donkey sanctuary, until his death in Palo Alto, California, on December 17, 2013.