Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Uncategorized Speakeasy with Phil Kline
Posted by Web Editor on Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:21 PM
By Gloria Love
New York-based composer Phil Kline isn't afraid of experimentation. He's written music for boombox orchestras and iPod ensembles, as well as for string quartets and Medievalist vocal troupes. He's perhaps best known for the annual production of Unsilent Night, a DIY performance piece in which he passes out tapes to attendees with cassette players, and then they all go electronic Christmas caroling. The upcoming Atlanta performance of his work will be decidedly more old school. The Vega String Quartet and the vocal sextet Lionheart will perform "John the Revelator," Kline's modern take on the Christian mass at Emory University's Schwartz Center on Fri., March 20. Kline will present a pre-show lecture at 7 p.m.
How did Unsilent Night come about and how has it evolved?
Unsilent Night began as somewhere halfway between a piece that I meant to perform and a Christmas party for my friends. I guess it was both at the same time, and the basic idea was that it would be like Christmas caroling. I'd been thinking about, a friend of mine and I were talking ... about "Oh, hey, do you remember when we used to go out tramping in the snow between people's houses singing Christmas carols?"
And at the time, I'd been working with orchestras of boomboxes ... . As many as 20 or 30 at a time. So, I wrote a piece that was basically a four-track piece made up of many different kinds of parts of things, and then I separated four sections of it onto separate cassettes and copied them a number of times so that when I invited a few dozen people ... there would be like six copies of each and on all of the 24 boomboxes, everyone would have one of the tracks. Continue reading "Speakeasy with Phil Kline"
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