by Kile Smith | Nov 29, 2017 | Broad Street Review, Choral music, Music Composition
[First published in Broad Street Review 28 Nov 2017 and reprinted by permission.] It was 2015 and I was staring up at another deadline. The art-song group Lyric Fest, with whom I was enjoying a season as their first resident composer, had asked me to write a work for...
by Kile Smith | Mar 21, 2015 | Art songs, Jazz, new music, Vocal music
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns reviewed the first of the premiere concerts of In This Blue Room—the cycle setting four poets inspired by the batik paintings of Laura Pritchard—and in the Broad Street Review, Tom Purdom reviewed the second....
by Kile Smith | May 28, 2013 | Choral music
[First published in the Broad Street Review, 27 May 2013, under the title The bearable weight of a German chorus.] Would I be their Ansager at the spring concert? he asked. He sings in the Männerchor, the German men’s choir that performs, along with the Damenchor, at...
by Kile Smith | May 1, 2013 | Classical music, Early Music
[First published in the Broad Street Review, 30 April 2013, under the title The great debate: Sackbut or trombone?] When all you have is a hammer, it’s said, everything starts to look like a nail. The job of constructing an answer to the early/modern instrument...
by Kile Smith | Mar 16, 2013 | Choral music, New Compositions
[First published 16 Mar 2013 in the Broad Street Review and reprinted with permission.] Because Donald Nally and The Crossing have performed my music, anything favorable I write about them might be read as biased. But I wanted to describe the effect of Thomas Lloyd’s...
