Read the Mercury‘s complete Big Ears 2016 coverage here. Visit the Big Ears website for the full lineup and schedule and ticket information.
The nief-norf ensemble takes its name from a self-deprecating invented onomatopoeia of what its members imagine many people hear when listening to contemporary classical music. Percussionist Andy Bliss is co-founder and co-director of the group. He will be on stage with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra during its performance of John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. Add to that three nief-norf concert time slots plus the Inuksuit festival finale (which Bliss will be co-directing with Steven Schick) and it appears that Knoxvillian Bliss has more scheduled time on stage during Big Ears than any other performer.
“I sort of direct the ensemble with Kerry O’Brien, who lives in Seattle,” says Bliss of nief-norf. “We started this organization in 2005 as a performance ensemble. We were working through graduate school at the time, so we would do a tour and then things would kind of slow down”
nief-norf’s contribution to the Big Ears program will include a bass clarinet, piano, and flute, but its emphasis will be on percussion.
“We call ourselves a contemporary music organization with percussion at the nucleus,” Bliss says. “Inevitably a lot of our repertoire ends up using percussion, because that’s what I play. We’ll have four percussionists doing some quartets and trios.”
Bliss is also director of percussion studies at University of Tennessee. His office in the new music building on campus is grand, with a glass wall facing a relatively pastoral patch of grounds. Bliss is tall and slim and apparently restive by nature, and during this conversation he is enlarged by an animated enthusiasm.
“The Thursday night show is going to feature a piece by Steve Reich called ‘Four Organs,’” Bliss says. “We’re doing a piece by Anna Thorvaltsdottir, from Iceland—three percussionists, with our backs to each other, and we have lights on our arms, so as we move through the space these shadows are cast around the room. We’re rubbing these large, resonant bass drums, and it creates this texture. She is a master when it comes to texture.”
nief-norf hosts an annual summer music festival in Knoxville. In 2014, Thorvaltsdottir was composer in residence. As it happens, Bliss also has strong personal and professional connections with Big Ears 2016’s composer in residence, John Luther Adams, and made the local introductions that led to that reality.
“My wife, Erin Walker, is also in nief-norf,” Bliss explains. “She and I were on our honeymoon in 2006 and we went to Alaska.” Bliss got his wife’s permission to “work” on their honeymoon and reached out to the composer, who happened to live in Alaska, albeit off the grid. The three met and had much in common, and Bliss and Adams became correspondents.
The high regard in which Bliss and nief-norf hold Adams is clear in the programs they have assembled for the weekend. Rather than glorify nief-norf, numerous works have been chosen to help listeners appreciate Adams and his work.
“John was born in the ’50s,” Bliss says. “He grew up listening to popular music. The second concert we’re doing is all inspired by popular music. The first piece is a piano solo by Alvin Lucier where I’m going to play these fragments from ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’ It’s called ‘Nothing Is Real.’ And then it’s recorded and played back through a teapot. The second half of the piece is me with this teapot, opening and closing the teapot, and it creates these—it sounds crazy.”
Interpretations of the Lucier piece are plentiful online. It sounds, if not exactly crazy, then appropriately nief-norf.
nief-norf performs music by Judd Greenstein, John Luther Adams, Edgard Varèse, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Steve Reich at the Square Room (4 Market Square) on Thursday, March 31, at 10:30 p.m. The group plays music by Alvin Lucier, Julia Wolfe, John Luther Adams, and Elliot Cole at the same venue on Friday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. On Saturday, April 2, at 11 a.m., nief-norf will perform Morton Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry at the Sanctuary (211 W. Fifth Ave.). They’re also appearing for the Big Ears finale, a performance of John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit, at Ijams Nature Center on Sunday, April 3, at noon.
Chris Barrett's Shelf Life alerts readers to new arrivals at the Lawson McGhee Library's stellar Sights and Sounds collection, along with recommendations and reminders of staples worthy of revisiting. He is a former Metro Pulse staff writer who’s now a senior assistant at the Knox County Public Library.
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