Leo Smit (American composer)

Leo Smit (January 12, 1921 – December 12, 1999) was an American composer and pianist.
Life
Leo Smit was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a child his mother took him to Russia where he studied with the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky. He later studied piano in New York with Isabella Vengerova and José Iturbi and composition with Nicolas Nabokov. While working as George Balanchine's rehearsal pianist, he met Igor Stravinsky.
He often gave thematic recitals – sometimes illustrated with his own slides – and performed a great deal of new music especially works by Aaron Copland. His breakthrough as a composer came in 1957, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra played his First Symphony. In that year he moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of California. From 1962 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He wrote two operas: The Alchemy of Love (1969), in collaboration with the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, with whom...