Phil Kline

For the Kansas politician, see Phill Kline.

Phil Kline

Phil Kline (born 1953) is an American composer.

Personal Life

Kline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Richard and Lois (Hoover) Kline. He was raised in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, where his father worked as a research scientist for Goodyear He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Aleba Gartner, and their daughter Clementine.

Education

Kline graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature. Among his teachers were poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. He later took classes at the Mannes School of Music.

Career

After Columbia, Kline formed the New York No Wave band The Del-Byzanteens with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, graphic artist Philippe Hagen, and painter/filmmaker James Nares; collaborated with photographer Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; and played, recorded and toured with Glenn Branca's guitar ensemble for 12 years. He also composed soundtracks for two Sara Driver films, You Are Not I, and Sleepwalk, as well as Gordon Stevenson’s Ecstatic Stigmatic.

Many of Kline's early compositions featured aspects of performance and installation art, using large numbers of boombox tape players to create sound sculptures, which were often ambulant. The best known of these is Unsilent Night, which debuted in New York’s Greenwich Village in December 1992. In this free outdoor holiday event, dozens or even hundreds of participants carry boomboxes that simultaneously play one of four tracks composed by Kline, as they walk a pre-determined route. As cassettes became obsolete, an Unsilent Night app was developed, and now the work is most frequently performed by people carrying cell phones and portable speakers. The event has become a holiday tradition that has been celebrated in more than 100 cities on five continents, including Ann Arbor, Asheville, Baltimore, Boulder, Cambridge (Ontario), Charleston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Melbourne (Australia), Middlesbrough (UK), Missoula, New Haven, North Adams, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Vancouver, and Whitehorse, Yukon. Critic Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times that Unsilent Night “immerses a listener in suspended wonderment, as if time itself had paused within a string of jingling sleigh bells.”

In 1991 Kline performed to a totally empty house at Artspace in New Haven CT. Despite the lack of an audience, he put a cassette machine in the front row and recorded his performance of Bachman's Warbler for 12 tape loops and harmonicas. A few weeks later, when composer Glenn Branca encouraged Kline to send a cassette tape to the music collective Bang on a Can, he sent that recording, resulting in an invitation to play in the annual Bang on a Can Marathon, where he gave the New York premiere of Bachman's Warbler. The piece was favorably received in The Los Angeles Times by critic Mark Swed, and was included in the CD Bang On a Can Live, Volume 2 on the CRI label. A commission from Bang on a Can led to Kline’s first instrumental composition, the sextet Exquisite Corpses, which was debuted by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at Lincoln Center in 1997. It was recorded for their debut CD on the new Cantaloupe Music label. His first solo CD, Glow in the Dark, was released on CRI in 1998.

Songs and Theater

In 2000, Kline wrote his first experimental music theater work, Into the Fire, based on texts by his Columbia classmate Luc Sante. It was commissioned by WNYC’s New Sounds program and premiered at The Kitchen in New York in a live radio broadcast. His first song cycle, When I Had a Voice, based on poetry of David Shapiro, was written in 2001 for mezzo-soprano Alexandra Montano, two child sopranos, and the Parthenia Viol Consort.

That was followed by Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs, written for vocalist Theo Bleckmann in 2003. Zippo Songs’ lyrics were inspired by the slogans that American GIs inscribed on their cigarette lighters in Vietnam. Rumsfeld Songs was based on the Pentagon briefings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Zippo Songs was one of the most talked-about records of 2004. It won “Best of the Year” citations throughout the world, including from The New York Times to The Guardian, CNN, NPR. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross called Zippo Songs "one of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned."

Turning increasingly to vocal music and theater in 2006, Kline created the site-specific chamber opera Locus Solus, based on the proto-surrealist novel by Raymond Roussel, and presented at the Ryerrs Mansion Museum in Philadelphia. He was then commissioned by WNYC’s New Sounds to write the mass John the Revelator, for the early-music vocal sextet Lionheart and string quartet Ethel. Joshua Kosman described John the Revelator as “gorgeous…a tour de force of artistic reinvention.” Fear and Loathing, a song cycle based on the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, was premiered at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center in 2008.

In 2012, Kline wrote the song cycle-monodrama Out Cold for Theo Bleckmann. The Frank Sinatra-Nelson Riddle-inspired work was produced by American Opera Projects and opened at the BAM Next Wave Festival, the first music theater piece presented at BAM’s new Fishman Space.

From 2005-2009, choreographer Wally Cardona commissioned Phil to write original scores for three evening-length dance pieces: Everywhere, Site, and Really Real. The premieres took place at BAM’s Harvey Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, Portland’s TBA Festival, Myrna Loy Center in Helena, MT, and New Haven’s Arts & Ideas Festival. In 2017 he composed the electro-acoustic score for Andrea Miller’s Stoneskipping, given its premiere by Gallim Dance in the Met Museum’s Temple of Dendur.

Kline has received grants and awards from Meet The Composer, the New York State Council for the Arts, the American Composers Forum, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and the Virgil Thomson Foundation. In 2004, he was the only classical composer nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize.

Selected Works

• Bachman’s Warbler (1992)
• Unsilent Night (1992-98)
• A Day in the Life of the Universe (1995)
• Exquisite Corpses (1996)
• The Holy City of Ashtabula (1996)
• Into the Fire (2001)
• When I Had a Voice (2001)
• last words before vanishing from the face of the earth (2001)
• The Blue Room and other stories (2002)
• Zippo Songs (2003)
• Rumsfeld Songs (2003)
• Locus solus (2006)
• John the Revelator (2006-7)
• Around the World in a Daze (2008)
• The Long Winter (2009)
• Canzona a due cuori (2011)
• Out Cold (2012)
• Blood (2014)
• In a Handbasket (2015)
• Dawn Chorus (2016)
• The Old Man of the Mountain (2016)

Discography

• John the Revelator (Cantaloupe, 2009)
• Around the World in a Daze (Starkland, 2009)
• Zippo Songs (Cantaloupe, 2004)
• Unsilent Night (Cantaloupe, 2001)
• Glow in the Dark (CRI, 1998)
• Liaisons-Reimagining Sondheim for the Piano (ECM, 2015) Anthony De Mare, includes Paraphrase
• A Sweeter Music (Other Minds, 2013) Sarah Cahill, piano, includes The Long Winter
• Outerborough (Innova, 2011) includes A Needle Pulling Fred
• For Your Safety (Naive, 2010) includes Over and OutIn C Remix (Innova, 2009) includes In Cognito
• Mixtape (Endeavour, 2008) includes Search and Destroy
• Messiah Remix (Cantaloupe, 2004) includes Hallelujah!
• Ethel (Cantaloupe, 2003) includes The Blue Room and other stories
• Immersion (Starkland, 2000) includes The Housatonic at Henry Street
• Alternative Schubertiade (CRI,1999) includes Franz in the Underworld
• Renegade Heaven (Cantaloupe, 2001) Bang on a Can All-Stars, includes Exquisite Corpses
• Emergency Music (CRI, 1997) includes Premonition

New York Guitars (CRI,1996) includes A Fantasy on One Note

• Bang on a Can Vol. 2 (CRI,1993) includes Bachman’s Warbler

with Glenn Branca: Ensemble Glenn Branca Symphony No. 6 (Atavistic)

• Glenn Branca Symphonies 8 & 10 (Atavistic)

with Deep Six:

• Garage d’Or (1987, Twin Tone/Coyote)

with the Del-Byzanteens:

• The Del-Byzanteens Lies to Live By (1982, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain)
• The Del-Byzanteens Girl’s Imagination (1981, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain)

External links

• Phil Kline's Website
• “Around the World in a Daze” surround sound DVD
• Cantaloupe Music
• The Housatonic at Henry Street surround sound recording