The new recording of avant-garde composer Phil Kline’s John the Revelator, a mass for six voices and string quartet is climbing the Billboard charts:

 

 

 

Phil Kline is a New York composer best known for his Christmas time boombox processions and Zippo Songs, a song cycle set to texts engraved on cigarette lighters by soldiers serving in Vietnam. John the Revelator is a setting of the traditional Latin Ordinary with propers using a variety of texts, including passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, a poem by American poet David Shapiro and Samuel Beckett’s monologue The Unamable. For the proper Dark Was the Night, Kline weaves a wordless fantasy on a 1927 recording by bluesman Willie Johnson. Two American shape-note hymns from the Sacred Harp: Northport and Wondrous Love provide moving bookends to the piece.

 

A review of the recording by Molly Sheridan is now on the New Music Box website:

 

 

If you are interested in performing John the Revelator please contact Craig Zeichner for more information.