NEW COURSE!
Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival is an eclectic, brilliant, and inspiring
gathering of musicians and performing artists from around the world. Now in its
13th year, Big Ears takes place in downtown Knoxville and offers festivalgoers
200 concerts, workshops, film screenings, poetry readings, and other
performances by artists including Laurie Anderson, MJ Lenderman, Trampled by
Turtles, Chucho Valdés, Hayley Heynderickx, John Zorn, Shabaka, and many, many
others. Intimate solo concerts, bands in large venues, open-air jam sessions on
Market Square, talks by scholars of jazz history: Big Ears is an immersive
celebration of art, language, music, and creative collaboration.
This course
will take a deep dive into the careers of diverse 2026 Big Ears artists prior
to the March 26-29 Festival; we will spend 4 days attending performances at Big
Ears; students will then give presentations about artists of their choosing.
Thanks to a generous donation from the Big Ears Festival, each enrolled student
will receive a free pass to the Festival (a $450 value). Students are responsible for their own
transport to downtown Knoxville for Festival events and must be available to
attend concerts on all four days of the Festival, Thursday-Sunday, March 26-29, 2006.
Enrollment for this course is by application; please fill out this Google form by November 7, 2025.
Required work: class and Festival attendance, group presentation, 3 short response papers,
Playlist Project, final paper and presentation.
