The Score | Knoxville Knockout

Big Ears, the eclectic music festival first held in 2009 in Knoxville, Tennessee, has hosted everyone from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to the Dirty Projectors, but this year the star attraction was a symphony orchestra. Before a packed house at the Tennessee Theatre on March 31, Steven Schick and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performed John Luther Adams’s Pulitzer-winning Become Ocean, Bryce Dessner’s Lachrimae, and Philip Glass’s Naqoyqatsi with cellist Maya Beiser, with all three composers in attendance. Adams, the festival’s 2016 artist in residence, participated in a free public discussion with Schick at a Knoxville pub, and Adams’s large-scale percussion piece Inuksuit was performed by the contemporary-music ensemble Nief-Norf outside the Ijams Nature Center. It was the second year the Knoxville Symphony appeared at Big Ears; in 2015 they performed music by Max Richter: Vivaldi Recomposed and excerpts from The Leftovers TV series.