Chatham, NY — This season, the ever-adventurous PS21, under Executive and Artistic Director Vallejo Gantner, commissioned composer Phil Kline to create two participatory outdoor sound sculptures that together form a seasonal diptych on the bucolic grounds of PS21: a winter soundwalk which premiered this past February at dusk, titled Force of Nature (February); and a summer solstice walk to ring in the first day of summer at dawn.
Force of Nature (June) will be premiered by the audience on Sunday, June 21 at 5:23am as part of Groundtone, PS21’s weekend-long celebration of adventurous music by an eclectic selection of today’s most original voices. Participants roam the contours of PS21 on cleared paths as the sun rises, playing Kline’s score on cassette players, speakers and phones that they carry. They walk as a group, becoming a collective symphony of sound. The effect is magical, as the sound seems to come from everywhere, the air, the meadows.
For the June piece, Kline’s electronic score incorporates the voices of local children as the heart of the musical fabric, including from Edgar Acevedo‘s Columbia County Youth Theatre. Participants will hear lines from poems and lyrics, including “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” by Lewis Carroll, “June” by John Updike, “In Time of Silver Rain” by Langston Hughes, and “She’s a Rainbow” by Mick Jagger/Keith Richards.
The sunrise performance ushers in the first day of summer and the first edition of the global Make Music Day in Chatham—marking a true celebration for those bold enough to rise early and participate.
While superficially akin to Kline’s luminous holiday soundscape Unsilent Night, which has become an annual December tradition on city streets around the world since 1992, this new piece celebrates the bloom of spring and arrival of summer, taking on the scenery of PS21’s verdant landscape and the vivid colors of sunrise.
Software engineer and artist Joshua Parmenter, who created the Unsilent Night app in 2011, designed a new app for Force of Nature so that participants can easily play the music via their phones (ideally attached to a bluetooth speaker, so that the sound carries outdoors). Kline will attend the event and lend out his collection of vintage Panasonic boomboxes pre-loaded with cassettes of Force of Nature (June), for those who don’t use the app. He will provide cassettes for those who bring their own tape players.
About Phil Kline
A survivor of New York’s downtown scene, Phil Kline is known for his range and unpredictability. From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and song cycles and stage works, his work has been hailed for originality, beauty, and subversive subtext. Out of the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Phil came to New York City to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. After graduation, he moved to the Lower East Side, cofounded the band the Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch and James Nares, collaborated with Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and played guitar for twelve years in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.
Early compositions used large numbers of boomboxes, such as Bachman’s Warbler, or the outdoor Christmas cult classic Unsilent Night, now a global holiday tradition. Other notable works include Exquisite Corpses, written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars; the politically-infused Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs;John the Revelator, a setting of the Latin Mass written for Lionheart; and the song cycles Out Cold and Florida Man, written for Theo Bleckmann, and Ghost Story for soprano Nicoletta Berry. Phil is currently working on a surreal comic opera about a family in the apocalypse, Blink!
His music is available on the Cantaloupe, Starkland, and CRI record labels.
About PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times). Their adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists showcase what’s new and thought-provoking in music, contemporary circus, dance, theater—and in entirely new genres. Largely supported by generous donors, PS21 is a must-see, must-experience destination for performances one won’t find anywhere else, at ticket prices that welcome all.