About Phil Kline
Phil Kline has created a remarkable range of music and sound art—from works using hundreds of tape players to ritual installations, theater and dance pieces; from politically-charged songs to an evening-length mass; from music for choruses and marching bands to chamber ensembles and orchestras, electric guitars and viol consorts.
Raised in Akron, Ohio, he came to New York to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. After graduation, he dove into the downtown New York arts scene, founding the rock band The Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, and Luc Sante; 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 solo performance art experiments (such as Bachman’s Warbler for harmonicas and 12 live tape loops) and often used large numbers of boombox tape players as a medium, most notably in the outdoor Christmas piece Unsilent Night, which debuted in the streets of Greenwich Village in 1992 and is now an annual holiday tradition performed around the world. Among the tape-based installations of this period are the semi-opera Into the Fire, with texts by Luc Sante, and last words before vanishing from the face of the earth, first heard on top of Terrible Mountain near Ludlow, Vermont in late August of 2001.
Instrumental compositions include Exquisite Corpses, commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars; Zippo Songs, a song cycle for Theo Bleckmann, based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters; Rumsfeld Songs, based on the Pentagon briefings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; The Blue Room and Other Stories, for string quartet Ethel; and the immersive music theater piece Locus Solus, based on the novel by Raymond Roussel, staged throughout the galleries and staircases of the Ryerss Mansion Museum in Philadelphia.
Commissions include the sound installation World on a String, created for the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; SPACE, featuring string quartet Ethel and electronics, commissioned by Alice Tully Hall for its gala reopening; John the Revelator, a setting of the Latin Mass written for early music specialists Lionheart; The Long Winter for pianist Sarah Cahill; orchestral pieces for the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra (Steven Schick, conductor) and St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble; the Sinatra-inspired song cycle Out Cold for Theo Bleckmann at BAM's Next Wave Festival; and scores for three evening-length dance pieces by choreographer Wally Cardona at BAM and Dance Theater Workshop.
Recent works include Dawn Chorus, a chamber septet based on the song of the Western Meadowlark, commissioned for the U.S. National Parks System centennial and premiered in Badlands National Park, South Dakota (released on Innova in 2020); The Old Man of the Mountain for amplified string quartet (FLUX) and the voice of William S Burroughs; For Louis Sarno for strings, piano, and tape; and Florida Man, Kline’s third song cycle for Theo Bleckmann, premiered by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn at Roulette.
Phil is currently working on an opera in collaboration with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, the lives and dreams of Nikola Tesla as enacted by the honorable spirits of the Grand Gotham Hotel. He lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his wife and daughter, and his music is available on the Cantaloupe, Starkland, Innova, and CRI labels.