Dispatches from the Culture War
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Last year, Big Ears kicked off with nief norf (more on them soon) performing Michael Gordon’s composition “Timber”, a piece for six percussionists playing amplified 2×4 pieces of wood with mallets. It was one of the great surprises and thrills of the festival. It’s a terrific piece, hypnotizing and thrilling at the same time.
Another in a series of 2018 Big Ears Festival previews courtesy of the i2b staff. All one of us. Share this widely if you please.
A passel of soul-thieving tempters in disguise; Pythagoras was fascinated by them, developed several laws of physics by observing them, and found his way to proposing a cosmology based on those laws. The well plucked string is a slippery damn slope, no question. Ask anyone who has a bottomless guitar collecting habit. Or ask their significant other.
Follow @immunetoboredom on Twitter or check back here for updates throughout the festival. Share this widely if you please.
The Big Ears Festival in Knoxville is, for me, the singular music event of the year. Four days jam packed with more music than you can shake a stick at, and way more than you can hope to catch. It is a banquet that offers far more than you can possibly sample, even if your appetite is yoooge. The option anxiety I face as I try to wrangle the Big Ears schedule into a digestible menu is fierce. I know I will miss something that I will regret. And yet…
My Dearest Stanwyck,
I sit down in near exhaustion to write these few lines in between the grueling marches of the Knoxville Big Ears campaign. My weary feet cover many miles each day so as to position myself advantageously in front of the august purveyors of the Euterpean muse, many of whom invoke Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Calliope, Clio…in fact, it appears that while Euterpe stands central to the affair, all eight of her sisters enjoy more than adequate representation amongst the artisans and craftspersons hard at work.
