Neil Tòmas Smith is a composer of chamber, orchestral and choral works based in Edinburgh. He is fascinated by the connections between sound, space and movement.
Neil studied in York and Stuttgart, the latter leading to a keen interest in German contemporary music. In Germany, he won first prize in the Acht Brücken Composition Competition with Gravitation, and his orchestral work, Habitus, was performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra.
Recent work has focused on the intersection between science and music. Perihelion and Aphelion for orchestra (a diptych that can be performed either way round) engages with orbits in both illustrative and concrete ways: there is an exploration of circular movement in the latter while orbital data informs the trajectories of the instruments in both. His piece based on the mechanical inventions of al-Jazari, Ingenious Mechanical Devices, was also toured round Switzerland and Germany in 2017 by Trio Radial.
Recently, Neil took part in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Composers’ Hub and the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Composers’ Programme. His piece for children, Cyched, was toured throughout Scotland in 2019 by the RSNO.
