Christmas-Adjacent: Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, in Cleveland and Kent

Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night is a Christmas-adjacent, strolling musical performance that combines December festivity, the need for community and tradition, with an aesthetic and rules that accommodate the changing times. New-York-based / Cleveland-born artist Andrew Ratcliff has hosted performances in Tremont since 2021, and will again Friday (December 13, 2024). Meanwhile, yoga Instructor and sound bath facilitator Alicia Patrice started an Unsilent Night performance in Kent in 2023, and is on the host committee again this year for a performance Sunday (December 15). Counting Cleveland and Kent, 33 cities around the world will push PLAY in performances of Unsilent Night this month.

What is this music? A sampling of reviews from New York and Los Angeles reads like a festival of descriptive one-upmanship. Writing or the LA Times, Joe Woodward described it as “A dreamy fruitcake of parts, tranquil even through its anarchy.” Writing for Time Out New York, K. Leander Williams said “Kline’s luminous, shimmering wash of bell tones is one of the loveliest communal new-music experiences you’ll ever encounter, and it’s never the same twice.” And the Onion, in a moment of sincerity, called it “an ambient wash of heaven-sent shimmer.”

The music itself is just a starting point. It’s performance art, in which everyone who shows up can be a performer. All you have to do is bring your smart phone and Bluetooth speaker, and join the walk. Written in four parts, it’s meant to be played during December by participants in a walk. You go to the website, or download the app, choose one of the four parts (or tracks) of the orchestration, and on the leader’s direction, press “PLAY.” Unsilent Night is not a jaunty melody, but more like a collage of sound. There’s no perceptible time signature. The music is an ethereal, evolving peal of bells, chimes, and synthesized sound. It has no words, so it can be festive without the complication of a religious overtone that could exclude anyone. It evokes the season without dogma or kitsch. It can accommodate any number of people. It’s free. It’s healthy. And it happens to have a strong local connection.

Composer Phil Kline was born and raised in Akron, and moved to New York to study English literature at Columbia, graduating in 1975. After that, though, he founded a band with a fellow Akron native, film maker Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise and Down By Law, among others). Then he began to make “sound sculptures” using recorded music played through boomboxes. The piece for which he is best known—Unsilent Night—premiered in New York in 1992. That first year, the music was performed from cassette tapes, with participants carrying boom boxes from Kline’s rather large collection of them. On his website, Kline says he had an idea for “a public artwork in the form of a holiday caroling party.” He invited a few dozen friends, gave each person a boombox with one of the four parts recorded on a tape inside, and told everyone to hit PLAY at the same time. “In effect,” he says, “we became a city-block-long stereo system.”

Ratcliff (who you may remember from the Waterfall Swing) first learned of Unsilent Night in New York in 2017 or 2018, he recalls. Several hundred people participate there, gathering at Washington Square Park. When he saw that Cleveland did not have a participating walk, he signed up to start one. He chose Tremont for its central location and neighborhood feel, hosting for the first time there in 2021. It started small, with about 20 participants, but has grown a little bit every year. Starting and ending at the Lincoln Park gazebo, past walks have wandered through the neighborhood, including the bars and art happenings of Professor Street, and views of sparkling Downtown Cleveland along the University Road stretch of the Towpath.

Patrice says she first experienced Unsilent Night in Sacramento, California, before she moved to Kent. She brought the idea, and Main Street Kent was receptive and became the host organization. The first outing there drew about 150 people. “The ethereal nature of the piece and the sounds used are similar to what you might find in a Sound Bath,” she says. “It encourages us to practice deep listening. Even though we all press play at the same time, there is still variation so that Unsilent Night can really envelop you in sound.”

So who’s up for an evening walk?

PHIL KLINE’S UNSILENT NIGHT
TREMONT: Hosted by Andrew Ratcliff
Gather at 6:30 to walk at 7 pm Friday, December 13
Lincoln Park Gazebo

KENT: hosted by the City of Kent
Walk begins at 6:30 Sunday, December 15
Start at the Hometown Bank Plaza, downtown