The nief-norf Summer Festival isn’t like other Knoxville music festivals. The annual two-week event, which is taking place on the University of Tennessee campus and downtown through June 19, combines public performances with academic lectures and workshops focused on contemporary classical music and attracts young performers, scholars, and composers from around the world. Much of it takes place out of the public spotlight, in the classrooms and rehearsal studios of UT’s new Natalie L. Haslam Music Center.
“A template for the day-to-day schedule for the fellows would be rehearsal from 9 a.m. to noon, with some master classes in there,” says Andrew Bliss, the director of percussion studies at UT and a founder of the festival and its associated performance ensemble. “The composers are getting lessons-—I just gave a class this morning on how to write for percussion for composers. Then we go to lunch, and after lunch there’s typically lectures for an hour or so and rehearsals and composition lessons.” Following a break for dinner, there are either performances—seven concerts in all, at Remedy Coffee, the Square Room, and UT’s Music Center—or more rehearsals.
The festival is an outgrowth of the nief-norf performance ensemble, a concert group established by Bliss and the scholar/performer Kerry O’Brien in 2005. (The name is an “onomatopoetic neologism” that stands for “any new music that was experimental or avant-garde,” according to the group’s website.) At the time, Bliss was a graduate student at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He started the festival in 2011, just before joining the faculty at UT. A colleague at Furman University, in South Carolina, offered to host the festival, and it stayed there for three more years. This is the first year it’s been held in Knoxville.
“We did it for four years and then this year made the group decision to move it here to Knoxville,” Bliss says. “This new music center and me living here now, it made sense in a variety of ways. So it’s here for good.”
The ensemble has had some presence in Knoxville since Bliss arrived here—every year, they facilitate a crowd performance of Phil Kline’s boom-box piece Unsilent Night, and last year the group performed Pulitzer-winning composer John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit, with the composer in attendance, at Ijams Nature Center. But the festival itself gives the group a higher profile in the local concert-music community and provides a platform for Bliss’ mission of promoting contemporary music.
“We try to get rid of this notion that composition is a thing of the past,” he says. “We see these big portraits of Beethoven and think that all composers are old white guys from hundreds of years ago, but it’s not that way. We try to celebrate a diverse roster of composers and work with them in a variety of ways—commissioning and premiering their works—to support this idea that classical music is alive and well and there are many interesting things happening out there. … We’re not going into this asking questions like, is this music? That’s not interesting to us. We’re asking things like, is this interesting? We try to have very open ears about the types of music we’re producing.”
Part of the reason for the group’s focus on contemporary music is that Bliss’ expertise is in percussion, and classical music written for percussion is almost by default music composed after World War II.
“Percussion innately lends itself to contemporary music,” Bliss says. “Our founding fathers of art music for percussion are John Cage and Iannis Xenakis and Stockhausen. These are the people who wrote the earliest pieces for percussion in a ‘classical’ sense. We always say Xenakis is like our Bach. That’s just our repertoire. We don’t think of it as new or gnarly or forward-thinking or radical. This is who I am and what I do.”
The nief-norf Summer Festival closes with a performance on Wednesday, June 17, at 8 p.m. and a final concert on Friday, June 19, at 5 p.m. Both shows take place at the UT Music Center.
Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.
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