The cosmos around a single artist, or the musical culture of a time and place, or an aesthetic mind-set. You start with particulars, the hooks to hang it on, and then you spread outward.
One obvious example is Bonnaroo, the annual four-day outdoor festival in central Tennessee. The core participants of that festival, roughly, are musicians who set their watches to the music and ideals of the Grateful Dead. But Bonnaroo also has its own lateral movement, extending all the way to, say, Metallica. It brings in 80,000 paying customers to the state and has become, for a certain kind of teenager, a national rite of passage.
Last weekend Ashley Capps, the organizer of Bonnaroo, put on the first edition of a major new three-day festival in Knoxville, where he bases his production business. The festival is held at theaters, clubs, restaurants and other places throughout the city, including the main art museum. He called it Big Ears, and programmed it with performers like Philip Glass, Antony and the Johnsons, Jon Hassell, the Necks and Fennesz.
So what connects these artists? Mr. Capps is trying to claim the space where vanguardist pop spills over into classical and improvised music. Mr. Glass played some of his piano tudes and then introduced the cellist Wendy Sutter, who performed a few handsome solo pieces he had written: classical music, top to bottom. Antonys fairly stunning set amounted to something like soul cabaret, with rigorous chamber-music arrangements.
The Necks, from Australia, look like a traditional jazz trio, but they play unbroken hourlong performances, building in tiny increments from short repeated phrases; 20 minutes can pass before a chord actually changes. Jon Hassell plays limpid, echoey trumpet figures over minimal rhythm backdrops. Christian Fennesz uses a laptop and an electric guitar to make fuzzy-beautiful soundscapes with digital pops, like exposed seams.
You could say that Big Ears was for people who like hearing nuanced music in excellent theaters, in a small town with no hassle: a place where you can walk down the main drag on Saturday night and see 10 yards 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.
The first nights music went heavy on drones: Fennesz with his guitar and digital hum, C. Spenser Yeh of Burning Star Core with his violin and electronics, Mr. Hassell with his long trumpet tones. Matthew Everett, the arts editor of Metro Pulse, Knoxvilles alternative weekly, told me later that he couldnt remember hearing any drums all night. I did, but I had to hunt for them, down at the Pilot Light, a small club on West Jackson Avenue, where the Shaking Ray Levis, a free-improvisation duo from Chattanooga, played.
Mr. Hassell grew up in Memphis, but in more than 30 years of performing he had never performed in his home state. (Hes got Miles Davis running all through his music, but hes not booked at jazz festivals in the United States; he tends to play progressive-minded European festivals, including Punkt in Norway, one of Mr. Cappss models for Big Ears.) His current American tour, the first in 20 years, mostly visits the expected places: Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York, where he performs on Tuesday at Zankel Hall. Knoxville is the big exception.
