Weekend Music Thread #06 Kile Smith

by russell

I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.

I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70’s. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I’m grateful, Kile is a good person to know.

Most serious arts have a sort of “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” aspect to them. They require a lot of time – hours and hours and hours – of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing – if you don’t really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?

It’s a challenge.

Kile is my age – 69 and counting – and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an “iron butt” – he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He’s an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.

And it is good.

Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He’s also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.

Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.

One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, “The Waking Sun”.

“The stars shine”, from his “Consolation of Apollo”, a setting of a text from Boethius.

“Three Spirituals for Piano Trio”, an instrumental piece.

Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He’s doing better – still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.

While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn’t having it.

Let us work while we have the light.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.