Gregg Smith

Gregg Smith (August 21, 1931 – July 12, 2016) was an American choral director and Broadway performer. He founded the Gregg Smith Singers, a mixed chorus of sixteen voices, in 1955 at an all-Japanese Methodist church in West Los Angeles, California, while completing his master's degree in music at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1970, the ensemble relocated to New York, the same year Smith appeared on Broadway in Hair.

The Gregg Smith Singers built a repertoire spanning several centuries, from the colonial-era American compositions of William Billings through contemporary works by Morton Feldman, as well as numerous compositions by Smith himself. The group also performed music by Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, William Duckworth, Earle Brown, Edwin London, Blas Galindo, Jorge Córdoba, Harold Blumenfeld, Irving Fine, Morton Gould, William Schuman, Louise Talma, Arthur Sullivan, and Ned Rorem, alongside early music by composers including Giovanni Gabrieli and Heinrich Schütz. Among their recordings is a holiday album, Christmas Songs from around the World, whose arrangements have been taken up by other choral ensembles.

A significant chapter in the ensemble's history was its twelve-year collaboration with Igor Stravinsky, which began in 1959 and continued until the composer's death in 1971. The Gregg Smith Singers have toured the United States forty times and completed sixteen tours of Europe, in addition to three visits to Asia. Over the course of their career, the group recorded more than one hundred albums on labels including Albany, Columbia, CRI, Koch International Classics, Lovely Music, New World, Newport Classic, Sony, Everest, and Vox. The ensemble has received three Grammy Awards.