Alan Smith to premiere song cycle at NYC songSLAM Festival

Pianist Alan Smith, chair of Keyboard Studies and director of Keyboard Collaborative Arts at USC Thornton, will be premiering a new song cycle on Saturday, Jan. 18 at the final event of the songSLAM Festival in New York City, organized by the art song consortium Sparks and Wiry Cries.

The five-song piece, titled “Surfing the Thin Places,” was written on Smith’s own poetry for soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough (MM ’11), an alum of the Keyboard Studies program.