Innovative instrumentalist Ned Rothenberg aims to declassify music

Ned Rothenberg

Ned Rothenberg

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," said virtuoso woodwinds player Ned Rothenberg, quoting Frank Zappa, as a way of explaining why it is so difficult to communicate the intricacies of the language of one art form through another one.

Known for his mastery of woodwind instruments, Rothenberg will be playing in Knoxville this weekend as part of the Big Ears Festival.

Although Rothenberg is often categorized as a jazz musician, he begins every day by playing Bach.

"An aspect of what I do is more classical than jazz," he said. "I mostly perform my own music and because there is this need to put music somewhere it gets identified as this or that."

"I think it's because the way music has been traditionally sold, the sellers decide which bin to put an album in. Then everybody thinks that is what the music is," Rothenberg said.

But now that music is being sold more and more electronically, the traditional patterns of music identification are changing. "The whole idea of classification is a mess," he said.

It isn't just how music gets identified and bought and sold that the new directions of music distribution has put into flux.

"These days, you can sweat over creating an album, carefully choosing which pieces to put next to each other and how much space to have between them and what to write in the liner notes in order to get across the whole picture you are trying to create."

"Then somebody puts it on their iPod and shuffles it all around, or just picks out one piece from different albums and puts them together and the whole image you created is gone," Rothenberg said.

It's not just the consumers of music who are now putting different genres together. In November, Rothenberg played a show in Paris called "Welcome to the Voices."

"I was the jazz soloist playing with Elvis Costello's band, string instruments and classical singers. It was rockstar men, opera women and an orchestra. That would not have happened a few years ago," Rothenberg said.

Over the years, Rothenberg has developed techniques that allow him to produce multiple sounds. "In a bass clarinet piece I play, by using circular breathing I get a high note that comes out over a lower drone," he explained. "Sometimes people think it's more than one person playing."

Although classical musicians might call such things a gimmick, Rothenberg doesn't care. He doesn't play for people who are only interested in figuring out the technical stuff. "The people who get the music don't care how it's being done," he said. "They're interested in what is being said."

Rothenberg's compositions are worked out in the studio, but the performance is fully improvised within a framework. "In the 19th century, that's how classical music was performed," he said.

"In my own work, I'm not trying to make claims that I'm equal to Chopin, but I'd say we were involved in the same endeavor."

As for as the new world of making-music with laptops, Rothenberg believes it comes down to how good the ears of the musician are.

"Anyone with a Mac and garage band can make mediocre music in five days," he said. "But it comes down to ears. You can't replace ears because they can't be betrayed.

"But if Bach were alive today and someone gave him a Mac computer, he'd say that's a neat tool and he would make great music with it," he said.

Rothenberg will be playing a solo performance at 2 p.m., Saturday at the Square Room. Then, he will join members of the Necks for a concert at the Knoxville Museum of Art at

6 p.m., Sunday.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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