by Kile Smith | Oct 19, 2015 | Art songs, WRTI Arts Desk
[First published in WRTI’s Arts Desk 19 Oct 2015] Two hundred one years ago this week, Franz Schubert wrote a song that would alter the course of music history. “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” is an unassuming title for Schubert’s first masterpiece and the start of...
by Kile Smith | Jun 19, 2015 | Art songs, Choral music, new music, Vocal music
As 2014–15 Composer in Residence for Lyric Fest, the Philadelphia art song group, I wrote three works for them: Mark the Music, a Shakespeare song for soprano, tenor, baritone, and piano, In This Blue Room, a 45-minute cycle for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano, and...
by Kile Smith | Apr 13, 2015 | Art songs, new music, Vocal music
In This Blue Room is a 17-song, 45-minute song cycle commissioned by Lyric Fest on poems of Julia Blumenreich, Susan Fleshman, Siobhan Lyons, and Donna Wolf-Palacio, which are based on the batik artwork of Laura Pritchard. It premiered 13 and 15 March 2015 with...
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 | Mar 12, 2015 | Art songs, new music, Vocal music
Lucky indeed am I to have seen and heard such a fantastic performance of Plain Truths on Wednesday night, March 11th, at Temple University. This was the original version, five songs with piano accompaniment. Baritone Lawrence Indik, professor at Temple University,...
by Kile Smith | Mar 8, 2015 | Art songs, Broad Street Review, Jazz, new music, Vocal music, WRTI
[First published in the Broad Street Review, 3 Mar 2014, as Composing “In This Blue Room”] They thrill me here, the seagulls. Above the Beneficial Savings Bank building on Broad at Chew Avenue, a block north of Broad and Olney, they weave and mull over a...
