When the 2025 Big Ears Festival officially gets underway this evening, one of the first shows will be the world premiere of The Mockingbird at St. John’s Cathedral.

Wright said he's hoping for “moments of transcendent beauty.”

When the 2025 Big Ears Festival officially gets underway this evening, one of the first shows will be the world premiere of The Mockingbird at St. John’s Cathedral.

The experimental piece, in keeping with the festival’s bent toward challenging experiences, is the result of a collaboration between composer William Wright and poet RB Morris.

Morris will read from his poetry collection The Mockingbird, accompanied by a chamber orchestra performing Wright’s loose composition. In separate interviews, the artists talked about the conception and development of the piece and their hopes for tonight’s performance.

For Morris, a former Knoxville poet laureate and a singer-songwriter, Mockingbird is a literary character with a long history. 

“He's been around for centuries in songs and poems, and he just has a big personality,” he said. “He's known as the Great Singer. He thinks he's the ultimate artist, and maybe he is.”

Morris began writing poems about Mockingbird in the 1980s, recited some of the poems during his musical performances from time to time, and published the collection in 2013.

He and Wright, another mainstay in the Knoxville musical scene, met for lunch at the Corner Lounge in North Knoxville in 2022, where they decided to collaborate. Morris slid a copy of his book across the table and gave Wright the freedom to compose what he wanted.

“I was instantly inspired and excited,” Wright said. “He gave me no time constraints and no creative guardrails.”

The result is a 90-minute experiment in indeterminate or chance music. Wright divided 52 of Morris’ poems into four sections. He assigned four notes — and only four notes — to each poem. The musicians — a 15-member chamber orchestra and three sopranos, under the direction of conductor Brenda Luggie — are free to play with the notes as they see fit and are encouraged to draw inspiration from the poems, the setting, the audience, or any other source.

Wright said the musicians have “radical freedom” to shape the performance, and hopes for “moments of transcendent beauty.”

Wright grew up in Rockwood and attended the University of Tennessee, but dropped out to pursue a musical career. Eventually, though, he earned a degree from the Berklee College of Music.

Wright’s career has gone in various directions, not unlike his composition for The Mockingbird. He’s best known in the local music scene as the founder and frontman for the band Senryu, but he also spent five years performing as LiL iFFy, rapping puns based on the Harry Potter books. He also composes award-winning soundtracks for movies, television and other media.

Morris is a Knoxville native who has spent four decades writing and performing poetry and music. His songs have been recorded by John Prine and Marianne Faithfull, among others. Former Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero named him the city’s first poet laureate in 2016.

Morris said the Mockingbird poems began to germinate in the 1980s, when he spent time at the 11th Street gallery of his close friend, the late Eric Sublett.

“They had some holly trees behind it … and the mockingbirds lived there because they love holly trees,” he recalled. “So I started sort of hanging out with them more and got these poems going.”

Morris and Wright met in the late 1990s when they played on the same bill at Blue Cats, a long lost club in the Old City, but they never collaborated on a project until now.

Neither is certain about what to expect tonight — that’s part of the deal. Though the musicians have been rehearsing for months, the structure of the composition doesn’t dictate what they should or shouldn’t play. The performance will be as much a surprise for the musicians — and Wright and Morris — as it will be for the audience.

“Experimental music, by design, we don’t know where it’s going,” Wright said.