A Winter a Wand'ring
The tradition of caroling has faded along with our grasp of figgy pudding and wassail, but composer Phil Kline has never lost the beauty of braving a cold, dark night to bring music to stranger and neighbors. During the early ’80s, Kline was a cool-kid in a CBGB-era no-wave band with Jim Jarmusch. (They were big in Yugoslavia.) Since then, his work has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Whitney, Mass MoCA, BAM, and London’s Barbican Centre. In 2004, Kline created a staggering song cycle based on inscriptions that American GIs carved into Zippos, and which haunts us still. But Kline is best known for Unsilent Night, a piece that has been performed every year since 1992, when he invited people to gather in Greenwich Village where he passed out boomboxes and cassette tapes, each of which contained one of four distinct musical parts. The music, like the crowd, weaved through the streets, forming an otherworldly sound sculpture. These days, folks download MP3s — there’s even an Unsilent Night app (bring external speakers if you plan to use your phone) — and the processions have spread across 35 cities, some even with twinkly lights, but the effect is always the same: unaffectedly magical.
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