Big Ears Festival Opens Students’ Eyes

March 18, 2025 by ljudy

For a group of undergraduates at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Big Ears Festival will be an extension of their classroom for four days in March. Immersing themselves in the music, art, and poetry from renowned performing artists is part of their research for a new interdisciplinary course offered by the Department of English.

“I first attended Big Ears in 2016 and was transported into a stratospheric realm of art, music, and creativity,” said Professor Urmila Seshagiri, who developed the course. “It was an experience I wanted to bring to my students.”

She arranged one-day passes for students in a couple of English classes, and last year five independent study students received general admissions passes, thanks to a donor and the efforts of Casey Fox, then development director at Big Ears.

“It was so successful that I went forward with plans for a formal semester-length course, supported by the generosity of a donor who was willing to sponsor 15 general admission passes for the 2025 festival,” said Seshagiri.

Students had to apply for the course and commit to attending all four days of the festival, including at least a dozen performances from among concerts, workshops, film screenings, poetry readings, and more by award-winning and emerging artists. Scheduled performances include Béla Fleck, Taj Mahal, Esperanza Spalding, Julien Baker and Torres, Wadada Leo Smith, Yaya Bey, Waxahatchee, and many more.

The students selected come from a variety of  majors and minors, not just English, art, music, and history but also sustainability, biochemistry, Africana studies, advertising, and business administration. 

“The Big Ears Festival is the crown jewel of Knoxville’s cultural offerings,” Seshagiri said. “It speaks to all the big questions that are the lifeblood of a university, and it opens our students’ eyes to possibilities that will always hold relevance for them, regardless of their chosen major or career path.” 

The festival’s cultural richness and variety matches anything found in a larger metropolitan center, she noted, and the passes will allow students at Tennessee’s flagship university to attend dozens of performances by musicians whose tickets for another single show might be financially out of reach.

Connecting Music to More

Through the new course, students learn how to think, write, and speak critically about music, literature, and other art forms. They write informal discussion posts that reflect on music they have heard and short essays about artists they have researched. 

“I have been gobsmacked by the quality of their writing and the nuance of their language as they describe what they hear, the connections they make to other forms of music and literature, the connections they find with current events or history or other books they’re reading,” Seshagiri said.

“As they take a deep dive into histories of culture, they learn, for example, about the relationship of jazz musicians, of blues musicians, to the civil rights movement,” she said. “They learn that the history of bluegrass music is a rich, complex, global journey that takes us from the banjo’s origins in West Africa to its movement into the Caribbean and the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade and how it subsequently became the instrument we associate with Appalachian bluegrass music today. So many performances at Big Ears embody how forms of music evolve as human populations move around.”

Art and Industry

Before taking students to the festival, Professor Seshagiri brought several guest speakers to their class. Ashley Capps, founding director of the Big Ears Festival, spoke about his career in music and music promotion, and festival Director Bryan Crow talked about the operations, from the logistics to the impact on the local economy. 

The students had visits via Zoom from musician David Grubbs and Ashley Kahn, a Grammy-winning music historian and jazz critic.

The students also visited John C. Hodges Library to view the archives from Beauford Delaney, a Harlem Renaissance painter who was born in Knoxville. While there they met with jazz pianist, composer, and producer Donald Brown, a former associate professor in the UT Natalie L. Haslam College of Music. 

The Delaney papers inspired a new composition by Brown that he will perform at the Knoxville Museum of Art the evening before the festival begins. The work is part of the Boundless: Artists in the Archives project, which invites artists to create works inspired by the UT Libraries’ special collections and archives. 

Preparing for the World

Based on their experience of a performance at the festival, the students will write a research paper focusing on an aspect of the music or literature that spoke to them. 

“To me, Big Ears distills what is most valuable in a liberal arts education and concentrates it into four days and 200 performances,” said Seshagiri, who also is an affiliate faculty member in the Global Studies interdisciplinary program.

“We go to college to learn to ask questions as well as to find answers,” she said. “We prepare ourselves to enter the world by understanding how the world we’re in came to be. We think about mortality. We think about language. We think about human creativity and resilience. We think about fragility. And the arts and humanities are an oceanic realm for engaging these questions.”

By Amy Beth Miller