ABSTRACT
If any one piece of music can be said to represent the technically sophisticated, but non-Internet related, world of interactive music of the 1990s, it is Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, a forty-minute, genre-blurring, musical tour de force employing dozens, if not hundreds, of boom box tape players carried by the audience as they parade through and perform in the streets of downtown New York. The resulting artistic spectacle that these marching musicians create is a living, moving, boom box sound sculpture; something Kline is fond of calling a “city-block-long stereo system.” 1 Now a recurring event in a number of American and European cities at Christmas time each year, Unsilent Night has become, since its first staging in New York’s Greenwich Village in December 1992, the quintessential nonsinging electronic caroling party, or, if you prefer Kline’s characterization, the “archetypal outdoor mega-boombox event” of the holiday season. 2 In 2003, outdoor performances of Unsilent Night took place in Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Tallahassee, and Vancouver, in addition to New York, where the yearly event has become a recurring cult-classic Christmas tradition. In 1999, Kline staged a performance of Unsilent Night in the New York offices and hallways of MTV, and in 2000, he organized and directed a New Year’s Day performance in Berlin.
