Steve Smith

I've been involved professionally in music and media for more than 30 years, and personally for even longer. After more than 20 years as a full-time professional reporter, critic, and editor in New York City and Boston, I am now Senior Copywriter for BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), a venerable and innovative institution I’d admired long before I moved to New York from Houston in 1993.

I've been deeply involved with contemporary music and living composers for decades, not least with the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning blog you are currently reading. In April 2020, I relaunched Night After Night as a Substack newsletter, at which time this site became an archive for past work and a home for my playlists, each a weekly diary entry in sound.

Previously, I was the inaugural director of publications for the Brooklyn-based concert venue and performing-arts incubator National Sawdust, and served as the editor and lead writer for National Sawdust Log (2016-20), a respected online journal of music journalism and criticism that showcased writing by well-established professionals and gifted emerging writers, recognized for support by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.

I also have served as Culture & Arts Editor for WNYC (2022–23); Senior Arts Editor for NPR (2021-22); Assistant Arts Editor at the Boston Globe (2014–16); and both Music Editor and Classical Music Editor for Time Out New York (2001–14). As a freelance stringer for The New York Times (2007–14), I filed multiple articles and reviews every week. On returning to New York from Boston in 2016, I resumed writing for The New York Times until 2024.

I began my career in New York City media as the classical music industry columnist for Billboard magazine (2001–03). I've since embraced a broad stylistic range in my music coverage, which has appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, Musical America, NewMusicBox, Jazziz, JazzTimes, Down Beat, The Wire, Signal to Noise [RIP], Chamber Music, Symphony, Decibel, and numerous other publications. I began my career in New York City media as the classical music industry columnist for Billboard magazine (2001–03).

I've written program notes for the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the BBC, and other prominent arts institution, as well as liner notes for recordings featuring the Kronos Quartet with Laurie Anderson, composer Michael Gordon, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and pianists Jenny Lin and Carolyn Enger.

Along with my work as a writer and editor, I have extensive experience in public relations, radio broadcasting, and live interviewing, onstage and on camera.

I trained formally as a percussionist, and put those studies to work with jazz groups in San Antonio, rock bands in Houston and New York, and the Long Island Gilbert & Sullivan Society. More recently I've performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Caramoor Festival, and the Ojai Music Festival, and in Make Music New York.

Home is Jackson Heights, Queens, where I live with my wife, journalist and scholar Lara Pellegrinelli, along with our brilliant daughter and two charismatic dogs.