New York, NY — This December, composer Phil Kline’s participatory sound-sculpture UNSILENT NIGHT—a beloved holiday tradition and a landmark in avant-garde public sound art—parades through dozens of cities across the United States, Canada, and Europe (Schedule updated daily at unsilentnight.com/schedule). Streets, parks, and sidewalks will come alive with “a shimmering sound-wall of bells and chimes that is dreamlike to wander through in the December nip” (The Village Voice).
This year’s flagship New York City event takes place Sunday, December 14, 2025 at 6:00 p.m. when Phil leads a massive chorus of boomboxes and amplified phones from the West Village to the East Village.Participants gather at the arch in Washington Square Park, and less than an hour and mile later, end up in Tompkins Square Park.
Williamstown, MA: Thursday, December 11
presented by North Berkshire Friends of Unsilent Night
HOSTED BY NORTH BERKSHIRE FRIENDS OF UNSILENT NIGHT
Isabelle Holmes, Sue Killam, and John Tibbets
5:30 PM — Meet at The Coffee Shop, 10 Water Street.
6:00 PM — Walk begins promptly
7:00 PM — Concludes back at The Coffee Shop
Bring: Your friends and family! Don’t forget to wear warm clothes and comfortable shoes. Please bring a way to play music, a flashlight or lantern. Additionally, feel free to deck yourself with festive lights!
Accessibility: Participants with limited mobility or other accessibility concerns are encouraged to participate as able and to contact organizers to discuss specific accommodations.
FREE
NOTE: In NYC and Williamstown, Phil will hand out a limited number of vintage boomboxes from his collection—and cassettes for those who bring their own.
Phil debuted his piece with a few friends on the streets of Greenwich Village in December 1992. It quickly grew by word of mouth and has since been presented by museums, performance centers, chambers of commerce, municipalities, universities, music ensembles, wineries, breweries, libraries, and groups of friends in 175 cities on five continents.
The composition is simple to present, and beautiful not just for what The New York Times calls its “nebula of phosphorescent sound,” but for the sense of community it fosters. Each person carries just one part of the four-track electronic score, but collectively the group creates the emotionally enveloping experience.
“The effect of Kline’s music is gorgeous. Bell sounds lap up against buildings and ricochet all around, and the nondenominational spirit of it can warm even the coldest of hearts.”
— THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
ABOUT UNSILENT NIGHT
Unsilent Night is an original composition by Phil Kline, written specifically to be heard outdoors in the month of December, always as a free event. It takes the form of a promenade in which the audience becomes the performer (each participant gets one of four tracks of music that they play simultaneously), walking a carefully chosen route through a city’s streets.
It started in winter 1992, when Phil had an idea for a public artwork in the form of a holiday caroling party. He composed a four-track electronic piece that was 45 minutes long (the length of one side of a cassette tape), invited some friends who gathered in Greenwich Village, gave each person a boombox with one of four tapes in it, and instructed everyone to hit PLAY at the same time. What followed was a sound unlike anything they had ever heard: an evanescence filled the air, reverberating off buildings and streets as the crowd walked a pre-determined route, creating a mobile sound sculpture different from every listener’s perspective. “In effect, we became a city-block-long stereo system,” says Phil. The piece was so popular that it became an annual tradition, and then an international phenomenon.
Phil Kline originally designed the piece to incorporate the unreliability, playback delay, and quavering tones of cassette tapes. “Today most people use digital audio players, so I make the audio available in that format as well—but there’s something about the twinkling, hallucinatory effect of a warbling cassette tape that I enjoy,” he says.
The studio recording of UNSILENT NIGHT, which layers all the tracks, is available on Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label.
ABOUT PHIL KLINE
From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and song cycles, Phil Kline’s work has been hailed for its originality, beauty, and sly subversion. Raised in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Phil came to New York City to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. Shortly after graduation he moved downtown, cofounding the No Wave band the Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch, Jamie Nares, and Lucy Sante, collaborating with Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and playing guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.
Many of his early compositions evolved from performance art and used large numbers of boombox tape players, such as Bachman’s Warbler and the outdoor Christmas cult classic Unsilent Night, a mobile sound sculpture performed by the public, which has become a beloved annual holiday tradition around the world (175 cities and five continents to date). Other notable works include Exquisite Corpses, written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars; The Blue Room and Other Stories, a string quartet for Ethel; the orchestral work In a Handbasket; and 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.
A master of song and found text, his most famed examples are the iconic Zippo Songs (based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters) and Rumsfeld Songs (based on the Pentagon briefings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), both written for his muse Theo Bleckmann and influencing a new generation of political protest music. A song cycle about a different kind of madness followed: the strange, authentically American Florida Man, brought to life again by Bleckmann.
Kline also often sets his own texts, such as in the mass John the Revelator, written for early music specialists Lionheart, and the Sinatra-inspired monodrama Out Cold, another tour-de-force for Bleckmann, which premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival.
Phil is currently immersed in music theater projects, including Ghost Story, a site-specific cycle for soprano Nicoletta Berry with Yarn/Wire, recently premiered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and BLINK, an upcoming opera about a fugitive family encountering the spectre of Nikola Tesla in the ruined New Yorker Hotel at the end of time—an early version of which was workshopped by Works & Process at the Guggenheim in 2024.
His music is available on the Cantaloupe, Starkland, and CRI record labels.