Kile Smith (born August 24, 1956) is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing 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.
His writings, mostly on composing and music, are published in the Philadelphia arts and culture online magazine Broad Street Review. He was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia 1993–2011. He writes and hosts the monthly Fleisher Discoveries podcast, 2018–present, and co-hosted, produced, and wrote Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on Philadelphia's WRTI-FM, 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 are Leighton Edward Smith (b. 1928) and Carol Pauline (née Kile) Renne (b. 1929).
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, that he decided in 1973, age 17, 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. Childs and Chris Woods.
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. Smith received Alumnus of the Year awards from both Temple (2010) and Cairn (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," 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 Moore began the monthly radio broadcast Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection in October 2002 on WRTI-FM, 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. After retiring from the Fleisher Collection in 2011, Smith accepted more duties at WRTI, producing and voicing Arts Desk 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. He has taught private composition since 1993.