To kick off its 10-year anniversary season on Saturday, October 26th at 7:30pm, GHOSTLIGHT will present the New York premiere of Kile Smith’s The Arc in the Sky, an hour-long intricate and moving work that was debuted last year to great acclaim by the multiple Grammy Award–winning chamber choir The Crossing.

Based on verse by the great Robert Lax—a poet influenced by phenomena as varied as jazz, nature, human acrobatics, and the Beat generation—The Arc in the Sky is a distinctly American pilgrimage into spirituality. Like Lax, Smith wields colors from various traditions—jazz, shape-note singing, Gregorian chant, and more—and paints a holistically cohesive landscape that, in turn, stimulates with dance-like rhythms, entrances with meditative repetition of Lax’s profound words, and thrills with sweeping walls of sound.

The following excerpt from the third movement, Cherubim & Palm Trees, serves as a taste of Lax’s playful minimalist style; it also provides a glimpse into Smith’s philosophy of choral music:

words played
like music
have meaning
as words,
like words
and music,
but not the same
meaning
and not
the same value
as words
just used
like words.

words played like
music
are poetic words;
words played like
music
are themselves
a kind of
music.

they are fetched
words,
fetched from deep
like rocks
and fish,
not hunted down
like quarry.
they are words
to cry,
are lyric words,
words which
hold a feeling.

We invite you to come and join us on this epic musical and lyrical journey!

Saturday, October 26th, 2019 at 7:30 PM
Church of Notre Dame
405 W. 114th St., New York, NY

Tickets may be purchased directly here.
$25 online
$30 at the door

Love,
GHOSTLIGHT