KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The Big Ears Festival started 10 years ago, disappeared, returned, reorganized as a nonprofit and has quietly grown year by year, filling theaters, clubs and galleries in downtown Knoxville. Rejecting musical genre classifications and spurning descriptions like “avant-garde” or “experimental,” Big Ears has never spelled out its aesthetic guidelines, and by now it doesn’t have to. Instead of sales metrics or star power, Big Ears contemplates the perceptual properties of music: shades of dissonance and consonance, the particular qualities of a drone, the ever-changing applications of subtlety and brute force. There was music to soothe, music to jolt, music to ponder and music to dance to. Here are 15 of the most intriguing performers and performances.

Source: New York Times March 25, 2019 21:00 UTC