Bill Smith
…is a composer and virtuoso clarinetist with several decades of experience in new music (as William O. Smith) and jazz (as Bill Smith). He has for 60 years collaborated with Dave Brubeck, and has composed numerous works for jazz and new classical performance. He has long combined classical music with elements of jazz in works commissioned by the likes of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Shelley Manne. Born in Sacramento in 1926, he went to Juilliard School of Music in New York while stalking the jazz clubs by night, then studied composition at Mills College with Darius Milhaud and at UC Berkeley with Roger Sessions.

Smith's association with Dave Brubeck began at Mills, where he was one of the founders of the Dave Brubeck Octet, and was responsible for many of its arrangements. His Schizophrenic Scherzo, which he wrote for the Octet in 1947, was one of the first successful integrations of modern jazz and classical approaches in what became known as “third stream.”

Smith has also been, since the early 1960s, a leading experimentalist in clarinet performance. Inspired by acclaimed clarinetist, Severino Gazzeloni, he developed methods of notating extended techniques, and won glowing reviews for his playing. In the New York Herald Tribune, Eric Salzman wrote in 1963: “William Smith’s clarinet pieces, played by himself, must be heard to be believed – double, even triple stops; pure whistling harmonics; tremolo growls and burbles; ghosts of tones, shrill screams of sounds, weird echoes, whispers and clarinet twitches; the thinnest of thin, pure lines; then veritable avalanches of bubbling, burbling sound. Completely impossible except that it happened.”

Bill Smith has won numerous prizes and honors including the Paris Prize, the Rome Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Grant. After teaching at UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the University of Southern California, and spending several years in Rome, he came to the University of Washington in 1966. There, he led the Contemporary Group for many years before “retiring” to full-time musical pursuits. Space in the Heart is his first “jazzopera,” although he had contemplated such a work for many years.

Peter Monaghan
…the librettist and producer of Space in the Heart, has long written journalism about jazz and other subjects, primarily scholarly research. He is so bad a singer that in 1966 he became the only student excluded since 1954 from his school’s annual massed choir of 600 voices, on merit. Space in the Heart is his first libretto.

Jim Horne
… has directed or music-directed dozens of shows in the Seattle area, including many for Aha! Theatre, Second Story Repertory, and The Concert Opera of Seattle. Formerly the conductor of The Turtle Bluff Orchestra and radio-play producer for The Ambit Group, Jim now works for Microsoft and writes about crossword puzzles for The New York Times website.

Virginia Paquette
… designed the costumes and stage settings for this production. An MFA graduate in painting from the UW, she has worked and exhibited internationally. Her art responds to motion and memory, and is inspired by natural forms and phenomena. Winner of numerous public art commissions, Paquette has collaborated with her husband, Bill Smith, on site-performance installations around the world, including “Deluge,” created for Queen Victoria Museum in Tasmania.

Reed Nakayama
… is the lighting designer for these performances. A graduate of Cornish College, he has worked on such music/theater works as Tom Baker’s Hunger (2007).

Daisy Li Emans
--- recently earned her master’s degree from the University of Washington’s graduate program in choral conducting, and now teaches music at a Seattle-area public school.