Gabriella Smith: Rewilding

Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.

Gabriella Smith’s music takes us outside the concert hall and into the natural world. Through evocative soundscapes inspired directly by her own experiences in wild places, she invites listeners to join her in discovering what she calls “the joys of climate action” while connecting deeply with our planet and its inhabitants.

Growing up in Berkeley, Smith’s passions for music and nature ran parallel to one another. When she wasn’t composing, she was volunteering for local conservation projects or backpacking—the John Adams Young Composers Project and a songbird research project in Point Reyes were particularly formative. After leaving the Bay Area to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she found herself longing for her wild West Coast home and began writing more and more about nature. Over time, her music and her life outdoors have become inextricably entwined.

The grandeur and sonic inventiveness of Smith’s music lends itself naturally to the orchestra. Recently, she has had pieces performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic. Her work Tumblebird Contrails has been played throughout the world, most notably at the 2023 Nobel Prize Concert by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and by the San Francisco Symphony that same year. Local concertgoers may also remember her organ concerto last season, Breathing Forests. Rewilding is her first San Francisco Symphony commission. In a recent interview, she talked about how meaningful it is to have the SF Symphony perform her work: “it feels incredibly special to work with the orchestra because I grew up hearing them perform.” (She will return to curate a SoundBox program in April 2026.)

Smith described what drives her most recent compositions: “We are up against this narrative driven for decades by fossil fuel companies that tells us environmentalism is only about sacrifice and individual action. Our job in the climate movement is to show people that climate action is actually about joy and community.”

The Music

Rewilding is inspired by Smith’s work in ecological restoration, specifically rewilding, an approach that turns areas transformed by humans back into functioning natural ecosystems. She writes:

Throughout my life, I’ve worked on many different rewilding projects around the world, the most recent being on a former airplane runway in Seattle. There are so many beneficial environmental results of rewilding, but the thing that keeps me coming back is pleasure: the pleasure of getting my hands in the dirt, of hearing northern flickers and Bewick’s wrens, of biking to and from the site (another climate solution that consistently brings me joy), and the pleasure of being part of something bigger.

To musically evoke the sounds of the outdoors, Smith calls for unusual uses of traditional instruments. Some of these techniques are part of the standard toolbox of extended techniques used by many contemporary composers, but some are entirely of her own invention. She also extends the orchestra’s timbral possibilities into our everyday world through playful uses of found objects. Tea strainers, chopsticks, mixing bowls—nothing is off limits as a potential musical instrument. In Rewilding, she prominently employs bicycle parts and asks for bulk foods like walnuts to be swirled in metal bowls by the percussionists.

As she always does when beginning work on a new piece, Smith recorded herself improvising on the violin to build a palette of musical ideas. One of her improvisations became a track with eight different layers of recorded violin sounds. The result could easily be mistaken for a live frog chorus. It was a perfect fit for Rewilding because the sound of frogs is particularly poignant and joyful in the context of habitat restoration—a healthy amphibian population is one of the strongest signs of a thriving ecosystem.

Pacific chorus frog at a rewilding site in Magnuson Park, Seattle. Photo: Photo: Gabriella Smith

Rewilding begins with the playful yet meditative sound of bicycle wheels, evoking Smith’s bicycle commute to and from the rewilding site. The music swells in joyful waves. We hear frantic activity in the winds, sometimes whirring, sometimes pointillistic like a chorus of insects. Frog-like sounds in the strings set the scene (she instructs the musicians to “be a frog”). As we descend from these ecstatic heights, the music gradually evaporates until we are left with nothing but the gentle clicking and singing-bowl-resonance of the bicycle wheels.

Smith writes, “Getting through the climate crisis will take everything we have—courage, persistence, dedication, hard work, but also imagination and creativity, community and love.” Rewilding envelopes us in this vision.