Phil Kline is a composer who makes music in many genres and contexts, from experimental electronics and sound installations to songs, choral, theater, chamber and orchestral music.
Raised in Akron, Ohio, he came to New York to study English Literature and music at Columbia. After graduation, he became part of the downtown New York arts scene: founding the rock band The Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch and James Nares, collaborating with Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and playing guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.
His early compositions grew out of his solo performance art and often used boombox tape players as a medium, most notably Bachman’s Warbler for harmonicas and twelve tape loops (1992) and the Christmas piece Unsilent Night, which debuted in the streets of Greenwich Village in 1992 and is now performed annually in dozens of cities around the world. Other compositions include Zippo Songs, a song cycle based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters, The Blue Room and Other Stories, written for string quartet Ethel, and Exquisite Corpses, commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
More recent works include the choral mass John the Revelator, written for vocal group Lionheart; a piano sonata, The Long Winter, written for Sarah Cahill; and scores for three evening-length dance pieces by Wally Cardona: Everywhere, Site and Really Real. The sound installation World on a String opened the season at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in September 2007 and SPACE for string quartet and electronics was performed by Ethel at the gala reopening of Alice Tully Hall in 2009. Kline is currently working on an opera, Tesla in New York, in collaboration with writer-director Jim Jarmusch, and Out Cold, a song cycle for Theo Bleckmann and ACME.
Shows:
Phil Kline appears in the following:
Your First Time and Subsequent Obsession with The Rite of Spring
Monday, May 13, 2013
Composer Phil Kline has thought about The Rite of Spring "at least once every day since I first heard it at the age of four." When did you first hear it? What did you think? Do you have a favorite version? Let us know.
The Future According to Eno
Monday, April 22, 2013
"When Brian Eno first beeped across my radar screen, it was as the other-worldly, boa-draped synthesizer player in Roxy Music." All this week, Phil Kline explores Brian Eno's contributions to modern music. Listen weekdays at 11 am.
Jean and Morty
Monday, January 28, 2013
Why juxtapose Sibelius and Feldman over a week's programming? OK, it's partly a whimsical reaction to a striking quote in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but there are, at least in their mature work, compelling commonalities. Hear Phil Kline weekdays from 11 am to 1 pm on Q2 Music.
Sensuality and Coldness in Debussy and Boulez
Monday, October 22, 2012
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Pierre Boulez (1925-): Two great French composers, one at each end of the continuum of twentieth century music. Debussy would typically be characterized as the more sensual and accessible, Boulez the colder and more forbidding, the hard-line modernist, but a little listening demonstrates their connections.
The Shostakovich Symphonies
Monday, October 15, 2012
The Shostakovich Symphonies are a maddeningly mixed bag, ranging from experimental to conservative, sublime to bombastic, and, most oddly, magnificent to awful. Hear them featured all week with Q2 Music's Phil Kline.
Percussive Fireworks from So Percussion and Friends
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Hosted by Q2 Music's Phil Kline, the opening night of the 2012 Look & Listen Festival offered an array of percussive fireworks for marimba, Mbira, vibraphone and more, led by the evening's curators, So Percussion.
Phil Kline Hosts for American Mavericks
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
The composer Phil Kline considers the history of mavericks in classical music -- "the lone wolf, deemed-a-crackpot, do-it-yourselfer" types. He notes that the label is no longer so relevant: "we’re all mavericky now."
Unsilent Night
Friday, December 18, 2009
It's become a holiday tradition: every year, in cities around the world, hundreds of people show up at a public space with their old boomboxes to participate in Phil Kline's ambient, techno Christmas carol called "Unsilent Night." Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Wally Cardona Quartet
Monday, May 21, 2007
Lines and Tickets and Bands...Oh My!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Unsilent Night
Friday, December 22, 2006
It's become a new holiday tradition: every year in New York (and a growing number of cities around the globe), crowds gather and hold boomboxes all cued up to the same song. That song is an ambient techno Christmas piece called "Unsilent Night," by the composer Phil ...
Unsilent Night
Saturday, December 24, 2005
It's become a holiday tradition: every year, hundreds of people gather with boomboxes to perform Phil Kline's ambient, techno Christmas carol called "Unsilent Night." Jonathan Mitchell went along for the ride.
Rumsfeld Songs
Saturday, September 25, 2004
The Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a playful, evasive manner of speech. Some call this spin, others poetry. When musician Phil Kline ran across a collection of Rumsfeld quotes, he was so taken with the rhetoric that he composed music to accompany the text. In his Three ...
