The Crossing @ Chorus America
Kile Smith's The Arc in the Sky
Friday, June 28, 2019 @ 5pm
Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square
Though Kile Smith has written several uniquely idiomatic works for us, his 2018 setting of journal entries and poems of Robert Lax is epic - an hour-long tour de force of thought and feeling that traverses topics ranging from Louis Armstrong to Jack Kerouac, and from Jerusalem to the shores of the island of Patmos. The enigmatic Lax presents a fascinating aggregate of paradoxes: friend to Thomas Merton and the Beat poets; urbane yet reclusive; at times whimsical, at others blissful. He ultimately explored a kind of literary minimalism, playing with form as if reinventing it, presenting, yet again an opportunity for us to consider words – ours, and those of others. Kile's music meets these words fearlessly, building great waves of majestic sound next to fragile threads of contemplation.
A Philadelphia composer, a Philadelphia choir, a Philadelphia event: this concert is presented in collaboration with Chorus America's Annual Conference, a national gathering of choral musicians, in Philadelphia June 26-29. Please note the special concert time of 5pm.
for we are only
going down,
only descending
by this song
to where the cities
gleam in the darkness,
or curled like roots
sit waiting
at the undiscovered
pool.
