A wave and waves
Michael Pisaro · Big Ears Festival · March 2017
One hundred percussionists, sixty minutes, and a museum. A wave and waves asks each player to make a single sound at a time and then leaves the accumulation to physics and to the room. I directed it at the Knoxville Museum of Art on the Saturday of Big Ears 2017, with Michael Pisaro in the building.
The problem a piece like this hands a conductor is not interpretation. It is delay. A hundred players spread through a gallery are hearing each other late, at distances that differ for every one of them, so the thing you are beating and the thing the audience receives are never the same object. You solve it by deciding what the audience should hear and letting the players trust the shape rather than the click.
The trio, the next day
Big Ears programmed a second Pisaro concert on the Sunday: a trio performance with the composer and Greg Stuart, who has recorded more of this music than anyone. Going from conducting a hundred people to playing with two of them, in the same weekend, is the clearest lesson I know in how little the number of players has to do with the size of a piece.
Ensemble Knox, the November before
The Big Ears performance did not come out of nowhere. In November 2016 the Ensemble Knox fall concert at the Emporium Arts Center in downtown Knoxville programmed Pisaro alongside Michael Maierhof and Simon Løffler, with three guest artists who had spent years inside this repertoire: Brian Archinal from Bern, Henrik Larsen from Aarhus, and Greg Stuart from South Carolina.
The room
