The new issue of musicworks, which some kind person sends me regularly from Toronto, has an evocative profile, by Monica Pearce, of the American-Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, whose spare, crystalline music has found an international following in recent years, thanks in part to the British label another timbre. The composer and author Allen Shawn, who taught Smith in high school, describes her early efforts: "I felt from the very first encounter that she was a composer. The connection between her and the notes she put down was so deep . . . She meant what she wrote, and she heard it and she felt it, and she needed it. That connection was the manifestation of a part of her that was essential, that she had to put on paper; and to me, that's a composer." The issue also has absorbing profiles of Wadada Leo Smith and Samuel Andreyev, by Alexander Varty and Nick Storring respectively.