Kile Smith
Kile Smith is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance, and the Canticle CD by Cincinnati's Vocal Arts Ensemble helped win the 2020 Classical Producer of the Year Grammy for Blanton Alspaugh. A Black Birch in Winter, which includes Smith's , won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.
His writings, mostly on composing and music, are published in the Philadelphia arts and culture online magazine Broad Street Review. He was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia 1993-2011. He writes and hosts the monthly Fleisher Discoveries podcast, 2018–present, and co-hosted, produced, and wrote Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on Philadelphia's WRTI-FM, 2002-2018. He is the recipient of a 2018 Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts for his first opera, The Book of Job.
Biography
Early life and musical influences
Kile Smith was born in Camden, N.J., and lived in Pennsauken, N.J. until 1975. He has lived in or near Philadelphia ever since. His parents are Leighton Edward Smith and Carol Pauline Renne.He was in the New Jersey All-State Chorus 1973, 1974. Smith credits this as helping to turn him toward composition. Entranced by the Brahms Nänie in the year his older sister Carole sang in All-State, he later searched for a commercial recording and found a two-record album with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Ernest Ansermet. He eventually listened to the largest work on the album, the Brahms German Requiem, the opening of which so transfixed him, he has related, that he decided in 1973, age 17, to become a composer.
College years
Smith attended Philadelphia College of Bible as a double major leading to bachelor's degrees in Bible and Music Composition. His composition teachers were Edwin T. Childs and Chris Woods.In 1979 Smith married Jacqueline Hardman, also a student at Philadelphia College of Bible, the daughter of the Rev. Jack Hardman and Dorothy Pinckney Hardman.
He went to Temple University in 1980, receiving the M.Mus. in Music Composition in 1983. His composition teachers were Clifford Taylor and Maurice Wright. Smith received Alumnus of the Year awards from both Temple and Cairn.
Work career
Smith conducted the choir at Immanuel Baptist Church in Maple Shade, New Jersey, 1977–78 and conducted the choir at Lower Merion Baptist Church, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 1980-85, with his wife as organist. He began working part-time as a music copyist at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, "the world's largest circulating collection of orchestral performance sets," at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1981, while studying for his master's degree. He was appointed full-time music copyist in 1983, copyist supervisor in 1986, assistant curator in 1988, and curator in 1993, a position he held until retiring in 2011 to compose full-time. He is the longest-serving curator of the Collection.He and Jack Moore began the monthly radio broadcast Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection in October 2002 on WRTI-FM, Philadelphia's classical music and jazz station. Smith produced the show and wrote an online essay for each broadcast. He began substituting as a classical music host on WRTI in 2005, and in 2008 began hosting and producing a weekly American new music program, Now Is the Time. After retiring from the Fleisher Collection in 2011, Smith accepted more duties at WRTI, producing and voicing Arts Desk features, increased classical hosting duties, writing, editing, audio editing, voicing, interviewing and producing interviews, and serving 2016-17 as interim director of content. Smith left WRTI in 2017 to resume full-time composing. He continues to host and write Fleisher Discoveries as a monthly podcast, produced by the Fleisher Collection and the Free Library, beginning in December 2018.
As adjunct faculty he taught composition at Ursinus College in 2020, composition, advanced orchestration, and music history at Cairn University, 2010-16, and music notation at Temple University, 2012. He has taught private composition since 1993.
Personal life
Smith is married to the soprano, organist, and conductor Jacqueline Smith; they live in Huntingdon Valley, Pa. They have three daughters: Priscilla Herreid, an oboist, Baroque oboist, recorderist, and performer on Renaissance winds; Elena Smith, a cellist, Baroque cellist, and gambist; and Martina Smith, a French hornist. He sang and played percussion in the Medieval/Renaissance group Quidditas with his wife, daughters, and other singers and instrumentalists in the early 2000s, performing in concert a few times a year. He is a cantor and sings in the choir of Holy Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Abington, Pa., where Jacqueline has been director of music and organist since 2000, and in two other choirs she directs, Musica Concordia and the Franklinville-Schwarzwald Männerchor. He is an avid photographer.Composing
Early career
Smith's earliest compositions, from 1974, were art songs and choral anthems. Among his earliest extant works are settings of Shelley poems and a setting of Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God". He wrote anthems for Lower Merion Baptist Church, and continued to compose for church choirs in which he sang and for which his wife was the organist/director, at Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, and Holy Trinity Lutheran, where he began composing liturgical music in addition to anthems.His Sinfonietta for orchestra, his largest work until then, was performed by the Temple University Contemporary Music Orchestra under Clifford Taylor, and was his first reviewed piece, by Daniel Webster in the Philadelphia Inquirer. His 1986 Sonata for Tuba and Piano was composed for Brian Brown, and in 1988 he orchestrated it into the Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra, which Brown played with the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia under Mark Laycock that year. In 1989 he set three Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins for his wife Jacqueline Smith to sing, accompanied by Samuel Hsu, at the Hopkins Centennial Conference, St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia. In 1990 the Concerto Soloists premiered his Hymn and Fugue No. 1 for string orchestra under founding director Marc Mostovoy.
He composed two chamber works for Philadelphia's Davidsbund Chamber Players, Hymn and Fugue No. 2 and Hymn and Fugue No. 3. The Totentanz for solo guitar was premiered in 1994 by William Ghezzi at the George Antheil Music Festival in Trenton, N.J. He composed Variations on a Theme of Schubert for solo piano in 1997, Paul S. Jones premiering it at a Cairn University concert honoring the 25th anniversary of Samuel Hsu's teaching there. Smith added a movement and orchestrated it in 1999 for the premiere by Makiko Hirata with the Jupiter Symphony in New York City, conducted by Jens Nygaard, as part of Smith's 1999-2001 composer residency.
Since 2000
For Jupiter he also orchestrated Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins for tenor and orchestra. In 2001 Jupiter premiered The Three Graces for solo oboe, horn, cello, and strings, a work of written-out jazz intended to sound like improvisation, in one of the last Jupiter concerts conducted by Jens Nygaard before his death. Smith has used jazz in other works: An April Breeze for solo trumpet and concert band, composed for the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts under Kevin Rodgers, with soloist John Thyhssen; the 45-minute song cycle for mezzo-soprano and baritone, In This Blue Room, commissioned by Lyric Fest; Adieu, Adieu, commissioned by Relâche; The Arc in the Sky, commissioned by The Crossing; the song "", commissioned by Benjamin Flanders; and , a five-song cycle commissioned by Conspirare.Vespers
commissioned Vespers from Smith for their group of seven musicians playing 27 instruments, and the new-music choir The Crossing. The subsequent recording on the Innova label and dozens of favorable reviews brought Smith's name to international attention.Gramophone Magazine called it "a spectacular work." David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer called it Smith's "creative breakthrough." Musicweb International chose Vespers as its January 2010 Recording of the Month,. Peter Burwasser, writing for Fanfare Magazine, put it on his 2009 Want List, and writing for the Philadelphia City Paper, included it on his 2009 Top Ten Classical list. After 2015 concerts by Seraphic Fire, David Fleshler wrote in the South Florida Classical Review that "the work sounds like no other music."
Vespers has received numerous performances by professional and university choirs, and one amateur choir. Smith has transcribed much of it for different combinations of modern and Baroque instruments, and individual movements are performed separately, including several movements Choral Arts Philadelphia, under Matthew Glandorf, commissioned and premiered in 2018, arranged for the instrumentation of the J. S. Bach Cantata No. 1, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.