It’s Wednesday morning, and composer Lisa Bielawa is leading a group of middle school band students around World’s Fair Park. In one hand she holds a megaphone, in the other a clutch of papers mapping all the moving parts of a musical event that will soon fill the park with sound.
This is a walk-through rehearsal for Knoxville Broadcast, a massive, site-specific “spatial symphony” presented by Big Ears that will unfold this weekend across three FREE public performances: Friday, Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 18 at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
During each 45-minute performance, nearly 600 local musicians—choirs, bands, orchestras and community groups—will begin playing together in the Amphitheater before gradually dispersing, “broadcasting” outward throughout the park. Listeners are free to wander, hearing the piece shift and transform as it moves across the landscape.
“This is the fourth city we’ve done this in,” Lisa says. “Berlin, San Francisco, Louisville and now Knoxville. It’s the smallest city but we’ve got great numbers. More people than I had in Berlin, actually. It’s pretty amazing.”
For this version, Lisa composed an original score inspired by Knoxville’s geography and musical traditions. Groups include Appalachian Equality Chorus, Knoxville Community Band, Knoxville Symphony Youth Orchestra, Halls Middle School Bands, L&N Stem Academy Concert Band and Orchestra, Drums Up Guns Down, members of Nief-Norf, Hardin Valley Academy Guitar Ensemble, Roane State Choral Society, the University of Tennessee Gospel Choir, and students from the UT College of Music.
Three all-ages “pickup” groups—the Sterchi String Band (old-time), Found Forte (found percussion), and the Sunsphere Singers (community choir)—were also open to anyone who wanted to join.
The concept is experiential, and adventurous. “If groups broadcast away from each other, pull away from each other, then eventually listeners are going to end up in a situation where they have to decide how they’re going to listen to the piece,” Lisa says. “It’s not a passive thing where people just sit there and music comes at them. It makes listening more active.”
Cecilia Stair is Big Ears’ community outreach coordinator, as well as a music therapist and talented cellist. She’s been working alongside Lisa to organize Knoxville Broadcast.
“We all have so much access to music constantly,” she says. “Most of us are doing a lot of passive listening, whether it’s at the grocery store or on our playlists. So to actively listen—to the degree where you’re actually physically following sound—that’s a really different kind of experience. It’s highly engaging.”
Lisa nods: “This activates listening in a way that brings a lot of vitality and helps people feel themselves present in the city.”
World’s Fair Park, with its mix of concrete, water and open green, was Lisa’s top venue choice from the start. “It has everything I need sonically,” she says. The paths and water help sound carry, and the buildings reflect it back. It’s ADA accessible, it’s protected from freeway noise, and it’s right in the heart of the city.
Cecilia says, “Because the music isn’t going to be amplified, those natural ways that the music is amplified are important—bouncing against and traveling along water, bouncing against buildings, things like that that you wouldn’t think about if you were putting together sort of an amplified, typical stagnant concert.”
When I visited Lisa in the Old City loft where she’s been staying a few weeks ago, she had sheet music splayed out in stacks around the room. But there was a method to the seeming madness — it all corresponded to where different groups would be staged around the Park.
She points to the coffee table: “What you’re seeing here, this is the amphitheater stage. And those two groups,” she says, pointing to another couple stacks of music on the floor, “they’re across the water.” Where the lake gets narrow, she explains, groups can play across to each other in a sort of duet. Everything is synchronistically timed, though, for the most part, the groups won’t be hearing one another.
“That’s important for the success of the sonic picture,” Lisa explains. “I’d never want this performed inside—hearing everybody better doesn’t make it superior. This is designed for a listener who’s in between things, choosing what to hear. Foreground and background are essential, which is why amplification is contrary to its spirit: It makes listeners passive by pumping out a single, fixed balance from one spot.”
With more than 600 musicians involved, you might imagine weeks of joint rehearsals. Not so. Every group has been preparing independently, on their own time. The payoff doesn’t come until the moment of performance.
“If you’re preparing your choir for a Christmas concert, you get the satisfaction of moving closer and closer to the finished piece,” Lisa says. “Here, even when you’re performance-ready, you’re still only part of the picture. Things don’t necessarily ever make sense until you’re there in the performance space.”
It takes a lot of visionary thinking, and mutual trust. It’s a big ask, she admits.
“We’re asking people to do something outside of anything they’ve done before,” Cecilia says. “It’s new and a little scary, but there’s this sweet spot—challenging yourself just enough, knowing we’re all in it together. There’s a sense of pride and excitement in that.”
Lisa credits Cecilia. “I’ve never had anybody involved in the project who’s a music therapist before, who actually understands that the process is the piece,” she says.
Following L&N STEM Academy and Halls Middle School through their walk-through rehearsals, I can almost see the wheels turning as the students process Lisa’s direction. They don’t have their instruments in-hand yet, but it’s still a sensory experience: they giggle when a breeze catches the fountains and sprays their faces with cool mist. They take selfies and point at the sunlight reflecting off the water, refracting onto the sails of the amphitheater and shimmering on the leaves of trees.
I have a lot of thoughts, but for the purposes of this article and in the spirit of a performance that hasn’t yet occurred, and that I expect will still surprise me, I’m going to hold back.
As Lisa says, “This piece isn’t about a thing. I’m not trying to deliver a message. People ask, ‘What are you trying to say?’ Well, if I were trying to say something, I’d write an essay—not music.”
Music, as she puts it, is “great at dodging questions.” Ideally, the act of making and listening to music “creates a space that brings emotion up in people,” she says, “but I’m not dictating what those emotions are, or what the piece is about.”
“If there were an agenda,” she says, “we wouldn’t have so much participation, because people would have to decide—are they on board with the message, or not? To have something that’s really just about making music is more inclusive. It gives more people the chance to feel like they belong, and to have common experiences with each other.”
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