He started his composing seriously at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University in 1990, where he took composition with Robert Lombardo and a composition seminar class with Patricia Morehead, and performed his "Carmen Fantasy" for piano during a student composition recital in 1992. He got a B.M. in Piano in 1994, cum laude.

He continued his piano studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he got a M.M. in Piano in 1995, and a D.M.A. in Piano Performance and Literature in 2002. While at the university, he continued composing a lot more compositions.

He composed over 700 compositions, most of them for the piano alone, andstarted getting into the world of electro-acoustic composition in 1994, wherehe had composed MIDI compositions as well, which he uses for tape music. His music ranges from commercial all the way to classical and even experimental compositions.

In addition to his campus accomplishments, he had some success as a pianist abroad. He attended the French Piano Institute in Paris in July 2000 and won an Honorable Mention in their final recital and competition. He went to Italyin 2001 to compete in the IBLA Grand Prize International Competition in Sicily, where he won an Honorable Mention for Musicianship. In the same year, he also performed in a master class under famous Hungarian pianist Csaba Király at the International Piano Master Class in Budapest. In March 2005, he performed his contemporary solo piano composition "Smooth Suspense" at the School of Designing a Society House Theater weekend in Urbana in March 2005. .In October 2005, he attended his first electro-acoustic composition conference,Electronic Music Midwest, at the Kansas City Kansas Community College (in Kansas City, KS) , where his original tape composition, "Synth vs.Synth", was featured. In February, 2006, Charles participated in the Black History Celebration concert sponsored by the Chicago Music Association, performing the complete Sonata no. 1 by living African-American composer George Walker, and also performed his operatic piano transcription "Non più andrai" from Act II of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro in honorof Mozart's 250th birthday.

He also performed two times in Chicago's version of the John Cage Musicircus in 2005 (at the Museum of Contemporary Art) and in 2007 (at the Chicago Cultural Center), doing an interdisciplinary performance of avant-garde piano and interpretative dancing.

More accomplishments came soon afterward. In 2007, his brand new one-piano/four-hand composition, "Samba in F-sharp Minor," was debuted by the duo-pianists, Donna Gross Javel and Bonnie Anderson as part of their "Anything Piano" project, and his other original composition, "Indigo Spanish Fantasy", was debuted by Jane Boxall Allen, an alumni of the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as part of her music project called "0 to 8 Mallets", and the CD release that featured that piece came out in 2011.

He debuted his own solo piano transcription of the "Erl-King" by Franz Schubert at the Amalfi Music Festival in Italy in 2008.

He also has started to create numerous videos on Youtube starting in 2011, featuring some of his original compositions, sometimes with his own visualizations.

CONTACT

1710 West 106th Street, Chicago, IL 60643

(773)621-5275 (m)

charlessmith702210@gmail.com

http://www.twitter.com/lamarjlinden