Calling all boomboxes for city's first 'Unsilent Night'

Drew Klein never thought it would be hard to find 80s-era boomboxes.

When the Findlay, Ohio, native, who works as the Contemporary Arts Center’s first ever performance curator, imagined bringing “Unsilent Night” to town, he figured local thrift stores would be flush with portable cassette players, the kind immortalized by John Cusack's classic ode to young love in “Say Anything.”

When he lived in New York, Klein knew of the December-focused public art/performance/event launched by composer Phil Kline in 1992. It’s a simple, and brilliant, idea: people gather with boomboxes and other portable music devices and traverse city streets to create a moving mass of sound. Each plays one of four tracks Kline’s composition, which lasts about 45 minutes.

“If you listen to the piece, it sounds just like minimalist chimes and bells,” Klein says. “It sounds like a holiday song without anything that would skew it toward one specific culture.”

The Cincinnati “Unsilent Night” takes place Dec. 15 and starts at 6:30 pm at the Contemporary Arts Center, where staff will have cassette tapes prepared as well as other methods of sharing the music with participants.

“I thought it would be a really good opportunity to have the CAC organize the event and call it a performance—to re-conceptualize what a performance could be and bend the audience’s expectations,” says Klein, who just turned 30. “Instead of being passive audience members, they will be directly responsible for participation and success.”

“Unsilent Night” will be staged in at least 25 cities this year, most of them coastal. Cincinnati is the only city in Ohio scheduled to host the event. In other cities, groups offer their own creative takes on the “unsilent” theme—some pull wagons with speaker-amplified laptops, some carry iPhones or iPods, some come in costume (think Three Wise Men or Santa). The possibilities are limited only by participants’ creativity.

“We know we are not going to get the 1,500 that show up in New York,” says Klein, who explains that the procession will begin at the Contemporary Arts Center and then wind its way through the streets of downtown, first heading north to Washington Park before turning back toward its destination, Fountain Square. “The hope is that this starts a really organic tradition that allows people from various backgrounds and cultures to come together to participate in an evening that is nontraditional that is tied to the holiday season.”

According to composer Kline, even if just 20 percent of the “Unsilent Night” walkers have a sound device of some sort, it will be enough to create something remarkable.

If all goes well, Klein expects for participants to wind up on Fountain Square and have a few minutes of music left to play, but he acknowledges that keeping everyone at the same point in the music is likely impossible. The composer allowed for that inevitability, though, Klein says. “There’s room in the music to allow for some beautiful mistakes.”

Do Good:

• Download the tracks for “Unsilent Night.”

• Join the chorus at the CAC.

• Watch other cities celebrate “Unsilent Night.”

By Elissa Yancey
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