Unpacking Big Ears - What We Saw At The Museum

Did we ever finish with the Big Ears 2019 retrospective?  We don't think so.

Per our plan, we spent a good deal on the last day, Sunday, at the Knoxville Museum of Art. 

It was far from the largest art collection we've ever seen, but it had a fine selection of work.  They had a Chuck Close painting and the work below, an upside-down replica on the Mona Lisa composed entirely of spools of colored thread hanging on strings, and which could only be rightly viewed by looking through a glass ball.

There was also a sound installation by musician and artist Tim Story called The Roedelius Cells.  We saw Story later that night performing with ambient master Harold Budd, but for this installation Story had several quiet selections of the music of electronic pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius playing from several speakers arranged in a circle.  The audience was invited to wander around the circle and hear the different pitches and harmonies as one walked from one speaker to the other, allowing the ear to absorb parts of one composition against the backdrop of another.  A meditative and calming experience.

Here are some scenes from a large mural depicting the history of Tennessee music.

The main event at the Knoxville Museum, though, was a performance of work by the avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier.  Much of his work is difficult to describe and there were parts where we simply did not understand what was happening, and other parts that explored overtones and harmonic interference patterns.  Listen to the changes in the sound even after the musicians stop playing.

Lucier, who is 88 years old, was present and even contributed to one piece, although it was one of the ones we couldn't understand but involved something about Lucier slowly walking through the room with some sort of transmitter in hand, apparently sending out some sort of bird-song signal to a receiver, or something like that.  Bonus points to Lucier for wearing a Black Lives Matter sweatshirt.

Several noted musicians in their own right were part of the ensemble performing Lucier's music, including Stephen O’Malley of the drone metal band SunnO))) (left) and experimental innovator Oren Ambarchi (center).

So that was an enlightening and entertaining three hours of so on a Sunday afternoon, and it says a lot about the overall quality of the Big Ears programming that we didn't even get around to talking about this until some four months after the festival was complete.