aworks :: "new" american classical music

Unsilent Night (1992). Phil Kline /tradition/

This is turning into a holiday tradition. Again I won't be able to attend Phil Kline's Unsilent Night in San Francisco. From the announcement:

A moving piece of ambient public art, Unsilent Night can be compared to a holiday caroling party, except that participants don't sing. Instead, each carries a boombox playing a separate cassette, CD, or MP3 that becomes part of the piece. In effect, Kline and his co-performers become single elements in a huge, mobile sound system.

MP3 clip.

Exquisite Corpses (1997). Phil Kline

I had to go into work today due to some IT problems. I forgot my iPod so I streamed Live365, starting with Kyle Gann's PostClassic Radio and then Robin Cox's Iridian Radio out of Santa Barbara. Notable so far, Phil Kline's Exquisite Corpses on Iridian. 

As Kyle Gann blogs today:

Whatever else it was, Downtown music was always, always, since those first bizarre concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft, an attempt to create a music in-between high and low art. Rather than superficially combine elements from classical music with those from pop and jazz (though it has certainly done that often enough too), it more often aimed at a new kind of music whose ontological status was in-between classical and jazz...

Exquisite Corpses, although presumably not improvised, has a lighter, "poppier" kind of instrumentation: clarinet, electric guitar, string bass etc -- very appealing. Thinking about Gann's comment,  my tastes are some kind of timbral triangulation between rock, jazz, and classical. It's less about how the music is composed/improvised/notated than about what the sounds are and how they interact.

Laura says this piece reminds her of her interest at the intersection of klezmer and classical.

Now playing, Full Orchestra from Steve Reich's The Four Sections. Bleh.  The instrumentation sounds so muddy and overwrought. Fortunately, for listeners, it's easy to switch to another Live365 preset, in this case, Music Mavericks/Crunchy, streaming The Black Angel's Death Song by Velvet Underground.

Chant (1995). Phil Kline

Even eerier than Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, Chant sounds like Robert Plant stuck in the BART Transbay Tube for eternity. Amazon samples.

Unsilent Night (1992). Phil Kline

The Standing Room blogs about the San Francisco performance of Phil Kline's Unsilent Night:

Kline's description of a cloud of sound is apt: the harmonies are by necessity pretty static and the pulsations change depending on who you happen to be standing near. But the transitions between sections are wondrous, as each machine moves on to a new chord or introduces a different texture at its own pace and in its own place. Listen, a voice! Where are those chimes? Are those sleigh bells up ahead? Or are they behind?

Anne Midgette in the New York Times describes the concept:

People show up at a specified meeting place with a boombox that can play cassettes. Mr. Kline prepares tapes in advance and distributes them. He has everyone start them at the same time, and then leads a parade of sound through the streets, droning and chiming and caroling.

Also in Philadelphia, Tallahassee, and New York, among other cities.

I was planning to participate last year but something came up at the last minute; this year, it escaped my notice...