“No tights,” I said. I would dress up as an Elizabethan king, but I was not going to wear tights at the re-opening of Shakespeare Park…
So begins my article in the Broad Street Review, which you can read here. Pictures at WHYY and the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Mailed to me at work. I was this close to being in “the most elite professional network in the world”:
Dear Mr Ralph Dumas: On behalf of International WHO’S WHO of Professionals, I am pleased to inform you that you have been nominated… We congratulate you! …an honor in itself… the most elite professional network in the world… It is in times like these that such a network is most valuable… I urge you to act today… Board of Advisors… Eurobrokers-Greece; Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank-Kenya; Citibank, N.A.-Great Britain; Abdu Dhabi Investment Company-UAE; Volvo Car-Russia; Hyundai Motor Company; Bulova Watch International, Ltd.; Shell Brasil… If you wish to unsubscribe…
The Crossing’s performance of The Waking Sun was reviewed in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer… David Patrick Stearns calls it “a hit.”
The Waking Sun, his setting of Seneca texts often divided into two or three contrapuntal strands that strained against one another in new, ear-pricking ways.
The piece has a huge musical range: unsettling rhythms of the opening movement; playful, quirky syncopation describing the bacchanals of the second; then the final movement fanning out into 12-part vocal writing to characterize universal love. There the music hit an intensely charged sweet spot that seemed to hang in a climax, unable to turn back but not knowing how to move forward, becoming even sweeter before concluding.
The intricate orchestration for baroque chamber orchestra Tempesta di Mare played to the group’s higher-personality members, theorbo player Richard Stone and concertmaster Emlyn Ngai. But the vocal writing is no doubt what prompted the hero’s welcome from the audience that packed the church up to the organ loft. Objectively speaking, The Waking Sun is, for lack of any better word, a hit.
Later, he calls my musical language “pared-back Anglican,” as opposed to Gabriel Jackson’s “lush Anglican” (his lovely Not No Faceless Angel was also on the program). I find the Anglican comment very funny. I mean, he very well may be right; I can’t say. I think of my voice as heavily informed by Lutheran chorale and American shape-note tunes, but I am aware that I’m not in the best position to judge these things. A very early piece of mine I thought to be indebted to Hindemith prompted a friend to comment on my influence from Ravel. And the hymnal I was raised on, the 1958 Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal, is thin on chorales and fraught with Anglicanisms, or at least the Bb melting-pot American sound whose main ingredient is British Protestant. It was a time when American Lutherans were terribly afraid of anything Teutonic, something many of them still haven’t gotten over, shame on them.
Plus I recall that my first musical infatuation was Vaughan Williams (as opposed to my first love, which is Brahms). I haven’t gotten over either of them, praise be.
I had forgotten about the contest I entered, and guess what?! Wrong. I didn’t win. It was National Punctuation Day, and there were 25 winners of the haiku contest. I just remembered it and looked it up. Three hundred and fifty-six people submitted more than 3,000 haikus describing a punctuation mark, any punctuation mark of their liking. I love the en-dash, correctly used in my biz to crowbar apart the years of dead composers, e.g. J.S. Bach (1685–1750).
That’s not a hyphen, oh, no-no-no, and certainly not—as you might be tempted to use—an em-dash. The en-dash is so named because it is the width of the letter n in some typeface or other, and the em-dash, the m. That is the sum total of my knowledge on the subject, and herewith, my losing entry, of the more than 2,975 other losers:
To separate birth
from death, a life is wished, but
the en-dash will do.
There’s a new look to kilesmith.com, but everything functions pretty much the same way. WordPress launches new templates all the time, and I always glance at each new offering, even though I was fairly satisfied with the old look. This template grabbed me right away with its simplicity. I hesitated changing, wondering if I’d lose information, but a check through the Help files emboldened me. One person in a user forum suggested saving whatever customized sidebar widgets there were, and I’m glad I took her up on that. I had to re-upload the header photo, but other than that I haven’t discovered any problems.
A change I noticed a couple of days before the new template is a WordPress improvement to how the menu works. So I spruced up the top menu with dropdown submenus and hover explanations, moved some items around (a lot easier to do now), and moved the now-mostly-unnecessary Pages widget to the bottom of the sidebar.
That got me to updating and cleaning up the sidebar. I deleted one or two widgets, and created one with a list of all my WRTI CD reviews. I’ve been posting those ad hoc, but now they’re all together in one place. They’re also accessible from Radio in the menu.
The About page underwent heavier-than-usual editing. The two bio’s of different lengths morphed into three, and now that I think of it, the Very Short one could be shorter.
All in all, the site should be cleaner and easier to navigate. I’m always tweaking it (when I should be composing), but let me know where you see that improvements may be needed.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how my blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of my overall blog health:
Whoa, the Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads “This blog is on fire!” That’s right. You see that meter with that pointy thing? And that ™ ? And the “!”? That means it must be true. Mustn’t it.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s. Just take their word for it. I did.
In 2010, there were 64 new posts, growing the total to 201 posts. There were 108 pictures uploaded, about 2 pictures per week. Now you know.
The busiest day of the year was January 6th with 273 views. The most popular post that day was Vespers Press.
The top referring sites in 2010 were wrti.org, publicbroadcasting.net, home.earthlink.net, facebook.com, and mail.yahoo.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly, for kile smith, bremen town musicians, kile smith composer, french horn music [who knew?], and kile.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
2. About
4. Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection
5. Listen
Just a bit of German, although I wish it were more. And 130 is true. Daniel Denvir, in the 23 Mar 2010 Philadelphia Weekly, his description of a stroll through the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Central branch, where they’ve let me work, lo, these… how many years?!:
We re-emerge to find ourselves in the Fleisher Collection, a particularly special oddity. The room contains more than 21,000 full musical scores and performance materials, the largest such collection on earth. The Free Library is the top lender of these materials to orchestras worldwide including some of the estimated 130 orchestras in the Philadelphia metro region. Curator Kile Smith has worked here 29 years, and every day he fields long-distance calls from music directors. “I got a call once and a guy said, ‘I am in Tokyo, do you speak German?’” recalls Smith, who fortunately does speak a bit of German.
