Some carolers dashing through the snow this holiday season are not singing. Instead, they are carrying Bluetooth speakers and cellphones to spread cheer with a reverberating piece of music written by Akron native Phil Kline.
“All I can say is that one day I just… had a vision that I was going to make an orchestra of tape players,” Kline said.
The New York City-based composer grew up in Northeast Ohio loving rock ‘n roll, classical music and also technology. And that’s what led him to create “Unsilent Night.”
The piece utilizes four different loops of sound and is meant to be played by anyone, publicly, in a crowd. He came up with the idea in the early ‘90s as small, handheld electronics were becoming popular. Inspiration struck during a conversation with a friend about the holidays.
“We were both of us from the Midwest, we were talking, ‘Did you ever go Christmas caroling?’” he said. “I remember in Silver Lake, walking in the snow with my friends in school. And all at once, I had this idea of doing a Christmas caroling thing where we all carried music on boom boxes.”
In 1992, he invited 30 people to help unveil “Unsilent Night” in New York. Since then, he’s seen groups of up to a thousand people taking to the streets with boomboxes or, more recently, Bluetooth speakers and smartphones to collectively play the composition on their devices.
Among the 40 cities hosting “Unsilent Night” events this year was, for the first time, Kent.
“This is what caroling has become,” said Keleigh Veraldo-Zucchero, one of the organizers.
Reflecting upon hearing about 250 people start the music up together in Downtown Kent on their phones, she called it “the most amazing thing.”
"My heart's still thumping a little bit,” she said. “It was very, very visceral to feel it all start at once. Just the whole feeling of community was amazing."
Alicia Patrice first experienced “Unsilent Night” while living on the west coast and wanted to see it happen in her new hometown. She teaches sound healing and yoga at Kent State University. The piece made her feel calm and happy.
“It feels like we did something together as a community where we didn't have to have social anxiety,” she said. “The boxes are playing the music and the sounds? Some people like them, some people don't like them. The way it bounces off the buildings and in the tunnel, I thought that was really cool.”
Andrew Ratcliff, a visual artist from Cleveland, is a big fan of “Unsilent Night,” particularly how it played in the pedestrian tunnel in Kent.
“That was during one of the most intense, almost to the point of being irritating, sections,” he said. “It was interesting that we reached that in that enclosed space with all those people. It definitely creates waves of emotion throughout the piece."
Ratcliff has also organized “Unsilent Night” in the Cleveland neighborhood of Tremont for the past three years. He always tries to time his route so the group arrives back at the gazebo where they started with a few minutes to spare.
“We arrange ourselves in a circle so everyone can hear the last few minutes of the piece,” he said. “Not everyone presses play at the exact same moment. So, it slowly kind of dies down quietly, and then silence.”
