Kile Smith
Kile Smith (born August 24, 1956) is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music.
[1] A Black Birch in Winter, which includes Smith's Where Flames a Word, won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.
[2] His writings, mostly on composing and music, are published in the Philadelphia arts and culture online magazine Broad Street Review.
Entranced by the Brahms Nänie in the year his older sister Carole sang in All-State (1970), he later searched for a commercial recording and found a two-record album with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Ernest Ansermet.
He eventually listened to the largest work on the album, the Brahms German Requiem, the opening of which so transfixed him, he has related,[6] that he decided in 1973, age 17, to become a composer.
He and Jack Moore[14] began the monthly radio broadcast Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection[15] in October 2002 on WRTI-FM,[16] Philadelphia's classical music and jazz station.
[17] After retiring from the Fleisher Collection in 2011, Smith accepted more duties at WRTI, producing and voicing Arts Desk[18] features, increased classical hosting duties, writing, editing, audio editing, voicing, interviewing and producing interviews, and serving 2016–17 as interim director of content.
He sang and played percussion in the Medieval/Renaissance group Quidditas[20] with his wife, daughters, and other singers and instrumentalists in the early 2000s, performing in concert a few times a year.
The Totentanz for solo guitar was premiered in 1994 by William Ghezzi[26] at the George Antheil Music Festival in Trenton, N.J.
He composed Variations on a Theme of Schubert for solo piano in 1997, Paul S. Jones premiering it at a Cairn University concert honoring the 25th anniversary of Samuel Hsu's teaching there.
Piffaro, the Renaissance Band commissioned Vespers (2008) from Smith for their group of seven musicians playing 27 instruments, and the new-music choir The Crossing.
The subsequent recording on the Innova label and dozens of favorable reviews brought Smith's name to international attention.
After 2015 concerts by Seraphic Fire, David Fleshler wrote in the South Florida Classical Review that "the work sounds like no other music.
Although he employs chromaticism on occasion, sometimes heavily, as in the middle movement of Where Flames a Word and in various songs, his pieces usually remain in one mode or key for extended periods.
Steven Ritter of Audiophile Audition wrote in his review of Vespers: "I'll call this music tonal with a twist; though modern, and it has some contemporary edges to it, it still feels almost uncomfortably familiar, a masterly mélange of old and new."
[35] Smith has composed over 20 orchestral works, including a Symphony: Lumen ad revelationem (2002) premiered by the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra.
The English Symphony Orchestra under Kenneth Woods premiered his orchestration of The Bremen Town Musicians in 2021 with Gemma Whelan, narrator.
His cello concerto And Seeing the Multitudes (2014) was commissioned by the Helena Symphony Orchestra and premiered by them with Ovidiu Marinescu, conducted by Allan R. Scott, as part of Smith's 2014–15 residency.
Abington Presbyterian Church (Pa.) commissioned Two Meditations on Freu dich sehr (2013) for organist Alan Morrison for the inaugural recital on their rebuilt Möller organ.
Johnson, with Conspirare of Austin, Texas, commissioned The Dawn's Early Light (2019) (with the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and cello) and April Showers (2021).
Agnus Dei (2015) was commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia[46] as a companion to the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Great Mass in C minor.
Piffaro commissioned Ave Maris Stella (2020) to be performed with Variant 6; the premiere, postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, is scheduled for October 2021.
These include three song cycles: the 17-song, 45-minute cycle for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano In This Blue Room[48] (2015), texts of Philadelphia-area women poets inspired by the batik paintings of Laura Madeleine, commissioned and premiered by Lyric Fest, for whom he was resident composer 2014–15; Plain Truths (2011, 13) for baritone and piano or string quartet with optional chorus, commissioned by the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival,[49] texts by Newburyport authors including the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; and April Showers (2021), commissioned by Conspirare, new music for 1920s popular song lyrics.
