Recent News
World Premiere of Ghost Story, Feb 23 at Gardner Museum in Boston
The world premiere of Phil’s song cycle Ghost Story will be performed at the Gardner Museum in Boston, MA on February 23, 2025 at 1:30pm. The cycle of 6 songs inspired by Isabella Stewart Gardner will be performed by Yarn/Wire and soprano Nicoletta Berry. The work was commissioned by the Gardner Museum.
Unsilent Night Presented in 30 Cities in December 2024
Phil’s piece, Unsilent Night, which has been presented across the globe every December since 1992, is being presented in 30 cities this month. The luminous soundscape is played by the public on boomboxes and speakers carried through city streets (or anywhere). 2024 cities include Berkeley, CA; Winchester, VA; Claremont, NH; Vancouver, BC; North Adams, MA; Monticello, MN; Atlanta, GA; Cleveland, OH; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC; San Francisco, CA; Frankfurt, Germany; Tours, France; and the flagship event, hosted by Phil himself, in New York City.
Press Quotes
“Magic was happening as you sat there. Here was a real original.”
— Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
“Phil is sort of a prodigy and a late bloomer at the same time.”
— Lucy Sante, The New York Times
“One of this era’s most fearlessly relevant composers.”
— Lucid Culture
“Phil Kline long ago declared independence from any musical Establishment, by inventing the orchestra of boomboxes—hundreds of them, scattered and only loosely synchronized…Kline has a cinematic ear. What might merely have furnished the soundtrack to screen clichés becomes, in his hands, the raw material for a set of sensational études.”
— Justin Davidson, New York Magazine
“What is consistent throughout Kline’s harmonic language is the emotional directness and expressiveness of his writing.”
— AllMusic
“Kline takes you and your expectations and directs them somewhere startling and fresh.”
— New Music Box
“Downtown composer Phil Kline is one of the more fascinating talents around.”
— Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
“Kline’s musical styles cast a wide net. They range from eerie electro-acoustical evocations of a bygone era of honky tonks to the muted tensions between sky and earth of nomadic space… His transitions flow as easily as a ride on a cruising Lear Jet.”
— Ellen Pearlman, The Brooklyn Rail
“Everything he does—as Cage said of Feldman’s music—is just almost too beautiful.”
— Kyle Gann, The Village Voice
“Downtown Kline may be, but his sensibility is symphonic.”
— Kyle Gann, The Village Voice
“Led Zep riffs and boom box tape loops never had such profundity.”
— Leopold Froehlich, Playboy
“one of the more striking composers that the Bang-on-a-Canners have given relatively wide exposure to. Phil Kline first made an impression through his pieces for harmonica and boom boxes that with single-minded obsession turn simple musical materials into arrestingly elaborate sonic experiences.”
— Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
“Kline’s settings are at once intimate, peaceful, darkly telling, and peculiarly sacred removed and elevated, as if looking back from a higher plane.”
— Stereophile
“memorable stuff with a pointed sense of humor…almost cinematic.”
— Dan Buckley, Tuscon Citizen
“Kline spins subtle musical threads that suspend horror and desperation in a web of almost spiritual contemplation.”
— Gramophone
“Few composers write for voice so perfectly and set a lyric so movingly.”
— Theo Bleckmann
“A strange and beautiful mind.”
— Jim Jarmusch
“mindful of tradition, happy to flout convention”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
“Kline has graduated from ‘experimental’ to ‘original’—he’s one of America’s most important compositional voices—thanks to his burning urge to communicate, and not things that can be reduced to a charismatic sentence. His pieces become part of your inner life no matter how little you understand them.”
— David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer
“The always-intriguing composer Phil Kline.”
— New York Magazine
“Downtown new-music hero”
— New York Magazine
“The downtown master.”
— The New Yorker
