Big Ears isn’t the only local music festival that explores the outer reaches of modern music. The University of Tennessee’s first Contemporary Music Festival will bring a program of challenging, and sometimes surprisingly accessible, 21st-century music to campus and downtown this weekend.
The festival begins on Thursday, Oct. 22, at the Haslam Music Center on campus, with the UT Contemporary Music Ensemble performing the post-minimalist music of guest composer Marc Mellits. On Friday, Oct. 23, the ensemble will play at the Emporium Center on the 100 block of Gay Street with the young Philadelphia-based composer Joo Won Park, who is known for his use of found sound and electronic manipulation. The festival concludes back at the Haslam Music Center on Saturday, Oct. 24, with a performance by the Contemporary Music Ensemble and Mellits of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. For two decades after its premiere in 1976, the minimalist masterpiece was rarely performed—Reich had composed the music but never written it down. As a graduate student in the 1990s, Mellits spent two years working with Reich to create a score for the piece.
“Since then, we’ve been seeing a lot more performances of the piece pop up, because it’s in a score format where people can rent it and play it,” says UT percussion professor Andrew Bliss, founder of the Contemporary Music Ensemble and one of the organizers of this weekend’s festival. “He took these event-based musical moments in the recording and laid it out in a way that could be reproduced by other people without Steve Reich in the room.”
For more information and a complete schedule, visit music.utk.edu/events.
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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