Big Ears Presents Knoxville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa - A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians - Oct. 17 & 18
Lisa Bielawa's Crissy Broadcast in San Francisco. Photo by James Block. Hi resolution press photos available here.
Big Ears Presents Knoxville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa
A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians
Three FREE Outdoor Performances at World’s Fair Park – October 17 & 18, 2025
More Information: www.bigearsfestival.org/knoxville-broadcast
KNOXVILLE, TN – August 19, 2025 – Although its acclaimed international festival is still seven months away, Big Ears has announced an extraordinary project for this coming October: Knoxville Broadcast, a large-scale, site-specific “spatial symphony,” created by the award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa, that will unite hundreds of musicians from across Knoxville in three free public performances at World’s Fair Park:
Friday, October 17 – 6:00 pm
Saturday, October 18 – 11:00 am & 2:00 pm
Knoxville Broadcast continues Bielawa’s celebrated series of Broadcast performances in Berlin, San Francisco, and Louisville—each rooted in the history and community of its location. The San Francisco Chronicle called Crissy Broadcast, “...one of the most moving performances of the year…where all the boundaries we take for granted in musical life…are casually obliterated.”
For Knoxville, Bielawa has composed a new score inspired by the city’s landscape, voices, and musical traditions. More than 600 local musicians of all ages and backgrounds will take part, including the 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 Community College Choir, and the University of Tennessee Gospel Choir. Three all-ages “pickup” groups—Sterchi String Band (old-time), Found Forte (youth percussion), and the Sunsphere Singers (intergenerational choir)—are also open to the public.
Bielawa will weave in spoken and sung texts contributed by Knoxville residents, embedding their words and stories directly into the music. Details on how to join a pickup group or submit text are at www.bigearsfestival.org/knoxville-broadcast.
World’s Fair Park—home to the 1982 World’s Fair and its iconic Sunsphere—sits on the former site of Knoxville’s rail yard and L&N Train Station, once a vital hub connecting the city nationwide. Today, it serves as a gathering place for concerts, festivals, and civic events that bring people together from across the region.
True to the meaning of “broadcast”—“to scatter in all directions”—musicians will begin in the amphitheater and gradually disperse throughout the park, coordinated by long-distance musical cues. Audiences can choose their own paths, hearing the piece from multiple perspectives as it unfolds. The design breaks down traditional barriers between performer and audience, creating a flexible, accessible, and deeply communal experience for all ages.
"The abundance of musical cultures here makes Knoxville Broadcast unique among my large-scale urban celebrations,” says Bielawa. “From Appalachian traditional music and folk guitar to found object percussion and West African drumming, plus a vital tradition of school and community bands, orchestras, and choruses—it’s been an exciting adventure collaborating with this vibrant city!"
Support for Knoxville Broadcast is provided by: Lawson Family Foundation, Boyd Family Foundation, Hobson Wood Foundation, City of Knoxville, and South Arts.
Join Knoxville Broadcast
For more information about participating in a community ensemble or contributing text for the event, visit: www.bigearsfestival.org/knoxville-broadcast.
Knoxville Broadcast Details
Composer: Lisa Bielawa
Produced by: Big Ears Festival
Location: World’s Fair Park Amphitheater, Knoxville, TN
Dates & Times: Friday, October 17, 2025 @ 6:00 pm
Saturday, October 18, 2025 – 11:00 am & 2:00 pm
Admission: Free and open to the public
About the Composer
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She has received awards and fellowships from the Koussevitzky Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, OPERA America, American Antiquarian Society, Loghaven Artist Residency, and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. Her music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. Bielawa consistently incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the pandemic, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress.
Artist Website | Broadcasts | Facebook | Instagram
About Bielawa’s Broadcasts
Composer Lisa Bielawa’s Knoxville Broadcast is the latest in a series of broadly inclusive Broadcast works, starting with her large-scale piece Airfield Broadcasts, a massive 60-minute work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin (Tempelhof Broadcast, May 2013) and Crissy Field in San Francisco (Crissy Broadcast, October 2013). Bielawa turned these former airfields into vast musical canvases as professional, amateur, and student musicians executed a spatial symphony. The series continued with Mauer Broadcast at the site of the former Berlin Wall, commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by Kulturprojekte Berlin in 2019; Broadcast from Home, developed remotely during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, which included the testimonies and home-recorded voices of over 500 people from six continents worldwide; Brickyard Broadcast, developed in 2020 with the city and university in Raleigh, North Carolina, partnering with their libraries to create a performance site entirely in virtual reality; Voters’ Broadcast, commissioned in 2020 as part of the Democracy and Debate Theme Semester by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York; and Louisville Broadcast presented in 2023 by the Louisville Orchestra in two historic locations, Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge.
About Big Ears
Hailed as one of the most unique and visionary music festivals in the world, Big Ears Festival brings together a kaleidoscope of musical and artistic traditions each spring in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since 2009, Big Ears has presented hundreds of groundbreaking artists from across the globe—spanning jazz, classical, experimental, folk, electronic, and beyond—alongside film screenings, art installations, conversations, and community events. Named by The New York Times as “a music festival with a rare vision,” Big Ears transforms Knoxville into an expansive stage, drawing thousands of visitors while fostering deep engagement with the city’s cultural life.