Kile Smith (born August 24, 1956) is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Dawn's Early Light with Conspirare and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet received a 2022 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance, The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing also 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 Where Flames a Word, won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.Estonian Best Choral Album of the Year 2019 award
His writings, mostly on composing and music, are published in the Philadelphia arts and culture online magazine Broad Street Review.Broad Street Review list of Authors He was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia 1993–2011. He wrote and hosted the monthly Fleisher Discoveries podcast, 2018–2024, and co-hosted, produced, and wrote Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on Philadelphia's WRTI-FM,WRTI, Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection 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 were are Leighton Edward Smith (1928–2024) and Carol Pauline (née Kile) Renne (1929–2026).
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 (1970), 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,Ray Cooklis (2017) Movers & Makers Cincinnati "Composer Kile Smith is reshaping the choral repertoire" that he decided in 1973, age 16, to become a composer.
College years Smith attended Philadelphia College of Bible (now Cairn University) as a double major leading to bachelor's degrees in Bible and Music Composition. His composition teachers were Edwin T. ChildsEdwin T. Childs, Composer, personal website and Chris Woods.Greenville University, Chris Woods, Emeritus Professor of Music
In 1979 Smith married Jacqueline Hardman, also a student at Philadelphia College of Bible, the daughter of the Rev. Jack Hardman (1929–1987) and Dorothy Pinckney Hardman (1930–1994).
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.Temple University, Faculty, Maurice Wright Smith received Alumnus of the Year awards from both Temple (2010)Temple University Alumni Gallery of Success Award Recipients and Cairn (2012).Cairn, the magazine of Cairn University, Alumnus of the Year, July 2012
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,"Free Library of Philadelphia, Fleisher Collection 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 MooreWRTI, Jack Moore began the monthly radio broadcast Discoveries from the Fleisher CollectionWRTI, Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection in October 2002 on WRTI-FM,WRTI website 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.Kile Smith website, Now Is the Time, 2017 After retiring from the Fleisher Collection in 2011, Smith accepted more duties at WRTI, producing and voicing Arts DeskKile Smith website, Writings, Arts Desk features 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.
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 (b. 1986), an oboist, Baroque oboist, recorderist, and performer on Renaissance winds; Elena Kauffman (b. 1995), a cellist, Baroque cellist, and gambist; and Martina Adams (b. 1997), a French hornist. He sang and played percussion in the Medieval/Renaissance group QuidditasQuidditas website with his wife, daughters, and other singers and instrumentalists in the early 2000s, performing in concert a few times a year. He sings in the Franklinville-Schwarzwald Männerchor.Franklinville-Schwarzwald Männerchor website He is an avid photographer.TIME IN with Composer Kile Smith: Immersed In New Artistic Adventures, Indoors and Outdoors
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 (Three Songs, No. 1, 1978) and a setting of Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God" (from Three Songs, No. 3, 1979). 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 (1986–2000), Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Abington, Pa. (2000–2023), where he began composing liturgical music in addition to anthems, and at Martin Luther Chapel, Pennsauken, N.J. (since 2023).
His Sinfonietta for orchestra (1983), 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 LaycockMark Laycock personal website 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 (now the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia)The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Mission & History 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 (piano trio, 1993) and Hymn and Fugue No. 3 (piano trio with alto saxophone, 1994). The Totentanz for solo guitar was premiered in 1994 by William GhezziWilliam Ghezzi personal website 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 HirataMakikio Hirata, Pianist, Repertoires, List of Concerti Performed with Orchestra (listed as "Smith, Kyle") 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 (2000) for tenor and orchestra. In 2001 Jupiter premiered The Three Graces for solo oboe, horn, cello, and strings (Gerard Reuter, Karl Kramer,Karl Kramer-Johansen, Performer (listed as "the three muses") Wolfram Kössel, soloists), 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: among them are An April Breeze (2002, premiered 2003) 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 (2015), commissioned by Lyric Fest; Adieu, Adieu (2018), commissioned by Relâche; The Arc in the Sky, commissioned by The Crossing; the song "Blue Lobster" (2020), commissioned by Benjamin Flanders; and April Showers (2021), a five-song cycle commissioned by Conspirare.
The Consolation of Apollo, using words by Boethius and the Apollo 8 astronauts, is his most-performed major choral work, with more than 60 complete or excerpted performances. He has written works for Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David Kim, principal clarinet Ricardo Morales, English horn Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia, and principal horn Jennifer Montone.
Vespers Piffaro, the Renaissance Band commissioned Vespers (2008) 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."David Patrick Stearns (2009) Philadelphia Inquirer, "Composers' shared idea yields disparate works" Musicweb International chose Vespers as its January 2010 Recording of the Month.MusicWeb International, 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."David Fleshler (2015) South Florida Classical Review, "Seraphic Fire wraps season with Kile Smith's ethereal 'Vespers'"
Vespers has received numerous performances by professional and university choirs, and one amateur choir.Linda Marie Bell (2016), Montgomeryville Patch, "'Acoustic Magnificence' Coming to Lansdale" 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.Choral Arts Philadelphia, Bach Festival of Philadelphia, 2017–2018 Concert Season
Compositional style