This Year's Big Ears Festival Had a Lot of Big Ideas, But Not All of Them Worked

Photo by Nick LeTellier

Tiring of the Kronos Quartet is a special problem to have at a music festival.

During the last four decades, the ensemble has become a classical crossover institution, existing at various times on the cutting edge of modern music, on the fringes of pop and as a unifying force moving capably between seemingly disconnected worlds. They are a collaborating-and-commissioning powerhouse, as able to spread their artistic reach as they are willing to reinvent it.

But this weekend, at the fourth Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, I elected against seeing them late on a Sunday night, when they were set to cap their busy weekend as “artists in residence” through a set with the guitarist Nels Cline. In the previous 48 hours, I’d seen them a half-dozen times. They’d improvised with Terry Riley, growled behind Tanya Tagaq, enlivened old folk with Sam Amidon and Rhiannon Giddens, pranced with Wu Man and gone the conceptual distance with Laurie Anderson for her sprawling and involving Landfall. I chose, instead, to let Swans rattle my skull a while during their own finale. Then I got in the car and headed back east, across the mountains that cradle the state’s third largest city.

My choice, truth be told, didn’t stem entirely from an overload of Kronos as much as from an overindulgence in the conceptual. Indeed, for the least impressive outing yet by what might be the best-funded experimental music festival in America, performances often seemed to be less about the sounds that came from the stage than from the very big ideas that their creators had toted with them onto said stage.

That applied to Demdike Stare’s 90-minute, after-midnight live score of the 1922 silent film about witchcraft, Häxan, and for Anderson’s multimedia reflection on modern life and New York after Hurricane Sandy. It held for William Tyler’s examination of the Confederate legacy in Corduroy Road and for Max Richter’s Knoxville Symphony Orchestra-assisted reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. These works were mostly excellent, yes, but by Sunday night, I’d grown weary of their inherent explanations—not just from Kronos’ David Harrington, who seems to give showing and telling equal purcahse, but from high-concept, multimedia meant to tell me what to take away and why. I needed Michael Gira’s cold glower, then, not another bit of generous context.

This was the third time Big Ears tinkered with an “artist in residence,” but Kronos' presence felt much more pervasive than that of Steve Reich last year or Terry Riley in 2010. It’s a tantalizing prospect, one that allows a group to present a more broad portrayal of their entire body of work rather than the small sample size afforded by a single set. And Big Ears 2015 was nothing if not a showcase for Kronos’ versatility. They coddled Amidon’s translations of century-old American standards but scraped and clawed at their instruments to add anxiety and urgency to Tagaq’s guttural onomatopoeia and coos for Tundra Songs. On Friday night, they were delicate and lithe with Man for Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic. A moment later, when they played the closing portion of Riley’s 2002 NASA commission Sun Rings without her, the quartet and a backing track of voices talking about the sight of Earth from space conjured post-rock’s own filmic designs. Perhaps now more than ever, excellence and eclecticism seem to be Kronos’ mutual animating ideas, perhaps to the point their focus has stretched into a blur. But Big Ears was a three-dimensional exhibition of those very best qualities and a brief demonstration of what it’s like to remain restless for nearly a half-century.

Tanya Tagaq / photo by Nick LeTellier

Kronos, however, had little in the way of counterbalance. Instead, a fleet of other acts—Richter, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Bing & Ruth, The Bad Plus, Hildur Guðnadóttir, even lutist Jozef van Wissem—delivered some variation on modern classical or indie classical tropes. In the mountains of Tennessee, that many bowed instruments generally constitute a fiddler’s convention. Several performers outside of that sphere, from folk revitalizer Giddens to astral explorer Grouper, made otherwise pretty and approachable music, stuff more suited for a Sunday afternoon than a Saturday night.

Last year, for the festival’s best iteration yet, Keiji Haino and his Nazoranai countered Reich. This year, it was up to Ben Frost to push against Anderson and Kronos. His late-night Saturday set was full of powerful moments but mostly devoid of momentum; he just didn’t have it.

_Ben Frost / _photo by Nick LeTellier__

The imbalance was exacerbated by the fact that, four years in, Big Ears has yet to invest in hip-hop and still treats beat-driven electronic music like an academic afterthought. It’s telling that, at this year’s festival, the most compelling use of rhythm came from tUnE-yArDs and the almighty kinetics of Zs’ “Corps.” For what’s rightly been dubbed the most audacious experimental festival in America (by me and others), this year’s Big Ears could feel, at times, as through tickets came cheap with every new AARP membership or NPR pledge.

As sales go, perhaps that feeling is not a bad play. On Sunday afternoon, for instance, I wedged into the corner of a balcony in a room generally reserved for weddings, watching as The National’s Bryce Dessner added guitar to his own flat-lining and tedious 40 Canons. The room was at capacity, with one of the only lines I saw all weekend snaking 20 feet out of the door. And in the Knoxville Museum of Art on a Saturday afternoon, the crowd for A Winged Victory for the Sullen was so swollen that Adam Wiltzie had to encourage sitting people to stand up and gather around the stage so that everyone could see. Was it really necessary to have a good eye line for simply pleasant swells that inevitably receded toward silence? It felt as if the avant-garde had suddenly acquired an adult contemporary glow—and experienced a boost in popularity for the transmutation.

Even in this off year, though, where too much weight was given to the softer side of its hearing range, Big Ears remained a music festival with few American rivals. It’s a risky endeavor, built on works that have been staged but few times before and artists and equipment that must be flown in from all over the world. (A shipping crate for one of Tyondai Braxton’s “Hive” sculptures sported a Sydney Opera House freight tag.) At a time when reunions and buzz bands drive the festival’s bubble economy, Big Ears largely eschews both, choosing instead to bet on projects that can confound even those who have come across the country to roam Knoxville’s historic and humble downtown.

_Tyondai Brixton's Hive _/ photo by Nick LeTellier__

And there were, of course, acts who did simply get on stage and head straight into riveting performances. Tanya Tagaq’s Saturday afternoon paroxysm, backed only by a drummer and guitarist, was the event’s ecstatic, harrowing peak. Clark’s Friday night party hung deftly in the balance between sheer motion and sophisticated mood. During an early and rare solo set Saturday, Wu Man’s hands—moving along the body of her pipa like an army of trained spiders—seemed to expend as much energy as some of the festival’s classical ensembles as a whole. Though Zs’ vibrant and brilliant show was one of the weekend’s most poorly attended, the trio delivered a controlled explosion of volume and intensity. It was perfect.

On Saturday afternoon, near the end of his allocated time in a dim room, Jozef van Wissem stood up on stage, hoisted his lute into his arms and descended a small set of stairs into the attentive audience. His straight, long hair drooped near his shoulders, and he was dressed in shades of gray that suggested he’d emerged as the Renaissance’s one true gothic. His tall boots clicked and clacked on the wooden floor as he walked through the crowd. Every few feet, he would stop and lean in dangerously close to a set of sitting people, his groin pushed forward like that of a cocksure guitarist taking a classic rock solo.

It was awkward, yes, but it was also kind of awesome—a sign of unapologetic gusto at an unbelievable festival that, for the first time, forgot to put enough of exactly that on the docket. Grayson Currin's ears are normal-sized; he's on Twitter - @currincy