The Big Ears Festival is an annual music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. The 2009, 2010 and 2014-2019 editions were produced by AC Entertainment. The festival incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in 2016 and has been independently produced since 2022.
History
The festival was founded in 2009 by Ashley Capps, founder of AC Entertainment. The festival was originally organized by Capps in partnership with Jason Boardman of Knoxville's Pilot Light and Chris Molinski of the Knoxville Museum of Art.[1]
In 2010, famed composer Terry Riley was named as the first "Artist in Residence" of the Big Ears Festival. The festival celebrated his 75th birthday year with three days of concerts by Terry Riley and a host of collaborators. In addition to Riley as "Artist in Residence", musician Bryce Dessner of the band The National was a guest curator of the festival.[4][5]
Big Ears 2011, originally planned for the first half of the year, was eventually postponed due to scheduling conflicts,[10] and then quietly canceled altogether.
In the summer of 2013, AC Entertainment began to tease a revival of the event on its official Facebook page, pledging news "in the coming weeks".[11]
Big Ears' return was announced on October 23, 2013 and took place March 28–30, 2014.[12] Curated by Steve Reich, it featured Television, John Cale, Julia Holter, Low, and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood among others.
The festival went on hiatus in 2020 and 2021 to help contain the spread of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Big Ears returned in 2022 with another four-day festival taking place March 24-27, 2022. The 2023 edition ran from March 30 - April 2, 2023.[13]
Reviews
Ben Ratliff, writing for The New York Times in 2009: "You could say that Big Ears was for people who like hearing nuanced music in excellent theaters, in a city with no hassle: a place where you can walk down the main drag on Saturday night and see 10 feet of empty space between you and the next pair of feet. You could also say that Big Ears was for people with long attention spans, good concentration and an appetite for letting repetitive non-dance music wash over them. And at least in its first edition — Mr. Capps intends to repeat Big Ears in Knoxville, and also export the idea to other cities — Big Ears was for concertgoers who appreciate not hearing a lot of introductions and context and sponsor announcements before the music even starts. In other words, at times it was heaven."[14]
In 2010 the festival was praised by Rolling Stone as "arguably the classiest, most diverse festival in the country."[15]
After an extremely successful return of the festival in 2014, Christopher Weingarten of Rolling Stone wrote that "Big Ears 2014 is the most ambitious avant-garde festival to emerge in America in more than a decade."[16]