Final Thoughts on Big Ears

It has been nearly two weeks since Big Ears and my notes from the Sunday concerts are still sitting on my desk, waiting for me to write this blog post.  And the delay was partially due to the general interruptions of life and Easter Week, but also due to the way that Sunday's performances and the close of the festival lead me to questioning what is meant by avant-garde. Don't worry.  I have no answers and won't wax too philosophical on you.

I suppose part of this questioning was simply due to the venues and performances I actually attended, and this may have been due to my own biases and choices.  It did seem to me though that much of what I heard, I would not classify as particularly avant-garde today, as it seemed to tap into or be a continuation of the music I first experienced in the 1970's and 1980's, when it felt very new to me, and now feels more comfortably modern but not necessarily something that makes me stretch my mental muscles.

This rumbling in my head started in with the first concert I attended on Sunday, the Kronos Quartet playing 40 Canons by composer Bryce Dessner, The piece was easy to listen to, including some fascinating interplay between the stringed instruments with some subtly interesting tweaking of melodies, but struck me more as an outgrowth of old-school New York minimalism, than as anything remarkably new.  I was more intrigued by the movements that focused more melody and the deconstruction and reconstruction of melody than on those that seemingly revolved mostly around variations in beat, but the younger members of the crowd seemed to be most enlivened by those very sections, the ones focused on beat more than melody.  This reminded me of my grandson, who seems to be focused more on beat and music that emphasizes a strong beat.  It made me question whether this is simply an aspect of youth — ie. was this how I listened to music when young — or a generational thing, and is my focus on melody, even deconstructed and fractured melody a sign that I am old, or at least out of touch with this generation of youth.  There are probably no clear answers, although I had also noticed the same phenomena at the Wu Man concert the previous day, with the greater applause and excitement being generated for the pieces which revolved around a more driving beat, and greater quietude along the softer more melodic pieces.  Perhaps this is as it should be.

After a short break, the Kronos Quartet returned to the stage with Tanya Tagaq for a stunningly gorgeous performance of Tundra Songs by Canadian composer Derek Clarke. In this piece the sense of rhythm and melody were more closely integrated, with Ms. Tagaq's throaty voice anchoring the at times ethereal and at other times wildly fractured swirling of the strings.  I had missed Ms. Tagaq's performance the previous day, but it generated a lot of talk.  I think this particular piece may have been a better experience for me, and I was happy to have heard it.  In the small crowded venue, with people standing packed together you could both hear the music with your head and ears, and feel the rumbling of Ms. Tagaq's deeper utterances through the souls of your feet up toward that sound.  It was an exciting performance.

Admittedly, at this point I was ready for a bit of rest and comfort, after nearly two hours on my feet and headed off to the Bijou Theater for to see Bill Morrison's film The Great Flood accompanied by Bill Frissell and his four-piece band playing the music he wrote to accompany the film.  The film and the music were lush, lyrical, and very moving, and well suited to each other, at times swinging and dancing, and at others mournfully flowing in harmony with the images on the screen. 

There was a break between The Great Flood and the next and final performance I wanted to attend, so I wandered around town.  It was at this point, as others stopped for a meal or a drink, that I thought about how nice it would be to have a concert buddy or two to attend concerts with.  I don't mind attending things on my own, nor do I usually mind eating at restaurants on my own, but on this day I would have appreciated having someone with whom to share and discuss.  Friends are available, but I hadn't yet made the effort to connect with them for this purpose, something to correct in the future.

The last concert I attended was Max Richter's Vivaldi Recomposed at the Tennessee Theater with members of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and soloist Yuki Numata Resnick.  Before the performance even began, as I walked to my seat, a bourbon in my hand, I could not help but smile as I overhead a young man ahead of me state to his female companion something along the lines of how could he not be happy listening to Vivaldi with bourbon and popcorn.  It reminded me that during Symphony performances one is not allowed to bring refreshments into the theater, although it is allowed for other performances, and how, if classical music is to survive, I continue to believe a way must be found to make it more accessible, and fun and probably that word — fun — is an important part of the formula.   This particular concert was a step in the right direction.

But on to the performance, which was, for the most part, spectacular.  I was amazed at the intensity and precision of the musicians of the Knoxville Symphony.  Their performance was absolutely breathtaking, and I hope they pursue more events and concerts like this as they had me on the edge of my seat.  They far outshone the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, which played with less precision as well as without the warmth of the Knoxville musicians.  Unfortunately I was less thrilled than the audience at large with the performance of Ms. Resnick, who did not necessarily distract from the performance, but did nothing to enhance it. 

As to the music, to my ears I was clearly listening to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.  Yes it had certainly been disassembled and reassembled, and although there was a strong hint of minimalism in this remaining of the work, it was not a brash minimalism, but rather a softening of a work to make it accessible to modern ears.  It was Vivaldi and it wasn't.  It was beautiful but then it struck me that was perhaps too modern, too beautiful, too accessible and almost soothing to modern sensibilities.  That does not mean it wasn't worthwhile, wasn't worth listening to, and I think there are great opportunities here for the symphony to work on ways to attract larger audiences. I wish the symphony would work out a way to play more works like this along side the traditional repertoire, not separately from it.

And that led to my final thoughts about the weekend, and my musings on the nature of the avant-garde. As I listened to Vivaldi Recompossed it struck me that this new reworking of The Four Seasons was probably more accessible and less avant-garde than the original.  Of course, in its day, the work probably was shocking; but actually if you actually listen to it in depth, with attention, Vivaldi's work is actually more challenging, more upsetting, and more shocking to one's understandings and perceptions than Max Richter's was. 

It struck me that I had neatly bookended my weekend: First with The Bad Plus's Rite of Spring and finally with Richter's Vivaldi Recomposed. Both made me look at the works differently, understand them differently, appreciate them in new light, but both works were also victims of their very modernism, and both lacked the shocking emotional weight of the originals.  We need the new, but we can't really afford to lose the old.

So what is avant-garde?  Is it something new or unusual or different from what is expected and mainstream? Or is it something controversial and shocking, something that shakes your awareness into looking at the world or some aspect of it differently from the way you had perceived it before?  Perhaps both.  But in that case the avant-garde can be mainstream, and the mainstream can be avant-garde. Or can it?