The Bloomington Early Music Festival (BLEMF) and the Historical Performance Institute (HPI) at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music are pleased to announce the continuation of a major partnership with Early Music America (EMA) this year that includes an expansive series of performances by emerging artists and college ensembles from across the United States and Canada. Performances and workshops are offered in beautiful downtown locations and on the IU campus. All events this year are free and open to the public.

Soloist Joyce Chen will 
perform as a Showcase ArtistThe 2019 festival commences with concerts highlighting the fourth-annual international conference, "Historical Performance: Theory, Practice and Interdisciplinarity," presented by the HPI and convened by its director, Dana Marsh. The Festival will also welcome performances and activities hosted by the Lute Society of America and the Viola da Gamba Society of America, an artistic collaboration with the IU Latin American Music Center, a seminar on music entrepreneurship led by prominent figures in the field, and a series of community workshops at the Monroe County History Center. All events this year are free and open to all.

Soloist Vincent Lauer will 
perform as a Showcase Artist“Following both the carefully planned and serendipitous successes of last year’s collaboration between BLEMF, the HPI, and Early Music America, it’s truly wonderful that we can explore and exercise this special partnership further still.” said Marsh, who also serves as a member of the BLEMF board. “This will create greater enrichment for students and emerging artists in historical performance attending from across North America; and, no less, the Bloomington community will benefit considerably from these free cultural offerings.”

Byron Shenkman will perform
works by Clara SchumannTaking place from May 17-25, 2019, the Festival will welcome IU alumnus fortepianist Byron Schenkman, who will lead an ensemble in a performance of works by Clara Schumann in celebration of the 200th anniversary of her birth. Keeping the IU connection alive, the festival will partner with the Lute Society of America by presenting a solo performance by one of Bloomington’s international artists, IU professor and lutenist Nigel North. The annual concert in the Monroe County Courthouse rotunda will be performed by local ensemble Las Aves, following their recent international debut in Ecuador at the Festival International de Musica Sacra de Quito.

Rezonance Baroque Ensemble 
Two Emerging Artists showcase events presented by Early Music America will feature a selection of emerging artists in North America: Aperi Animam, a vocal ensemble from Milwaukee, WI; Joyce Chen, harpsichord, from Princeton; NJ, Vincent Lauzer, recorder, from Montréal, Canada; and Rezonance Baroque Ensemble, from Toronto, Canada.

Aperi AnimamThe annual EMA Young Performers Festival will offer a series of five concerts over three days by some of the leading early music programs in North America: The Oberlin Baroque (Oberlin, OH); McGill University Baroque Ensemble (Montreal, Canada); USC Thornton Collegium Workshop (Los Angeles, CA); and the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble (Baltimore, MD).  In addition, the series will present The Brandenburg Project, a youth period ensemble from the Community Music School of Ann Arbor, MI.

The Brandenburg Project“Just as composers relish a second performance of a new work, Early Music America is thrilled to be able to return to Bloomington for a second year,” said Karin Brookes, Executive Director of Early Music America. “BLEMF and HPI have been such creative and supportive partners with EMA, and we are all excited by the rich experiences planned for participants and community and audience members.”

Nigel North will perform 
a solo recitalAs the final concert of the 2019 Bloomington Early Music Festival, students and alumni from the Historical Performance Institute, directed by renowned early music soprano, Nell Snaidas, will produce and perform a concert version of the one-act opera La Púrpura de la rosa (The Blood of the Rose), the first known opera to be composed and performed in the Americas. The performance is co-sponsored by the IU Latin American Music Center and offers Bloomington audiences a truly unique opportunity to experience a significant historical moment in the Americas.  

The Peabody Renaissance Ensemble“The Bloomington Early Music Festival continues to blossom in the heart of Bloomington,” said Alain Barker, president of Bloomington Early Music, “offering the community and region an opportunity to experience exquisite music from past centuries up close. None of this would happen without the spirit of collaboration and support that comes from so many individuals and organizations, both on and off the IU campus. For this, we are very grateful.”
The Instrument Petting Zoo, perhaps the most accessible part of the festival for early music enthusiasts of all ages, will be presented at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market. As part of the day’s festivities, the Bloomington Quarry Morris Dancers will once again offer a performance on the City Hall Plaza. 

Instruments at the Petting Zoo!WFIU Public Radio, the festival’s primary media partner, will feature many recordings from the festival through its nationally syndicated program, Harmonia.
Information about performances and activities surrounding the Festival this year can be found online via blemf.org and on social media. For more information, please contact the festival organizers at office@blemf.org. 

THE PARTNERS
Bloomington Early Music supports, encourages, and produces historically informed performance arts in Bloomington and South-Central Indiana.
Early Music America serves and strengthens the early music community in North America through grants, scholarships, and resources that help everyone in the field at any level to explore, engage, and connect with early music and one another.
The Historical Performance Institute at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music offers students the highest standard of instrumental and vocal training along with a thorough grounding in the academic reference tools of the profession – comprehensive theoretical, critical, historiographical and practical skills: to study, interpret, and perform period-specific music of the past millennium.
WFIU Public Radio serves south-central Indiana with cultural programming and NPR News. WFIU also extends the educational mission of Indiana University across America and beyond as the producer and distributor of programs including Harmonia. For more than two decades, Harmonia has been a chief destination for early music on dozens of U.S. broadcast outlets, and online at harmoniaearlymusic.org.
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Funding for the festival comes from grants, individual contributions, corporation sponsorship, and organizational partnerships. Sources include the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Council, the Bloomington Arts Commission, Indiana Arts Commission, Early Music America, The Lute Society of America, and the Indiana University Latin American Music Center.

Dear Friends,

As 2018 comes to a close, Bloomington Early Music celebrates a season of unprecedented growth, thanks to the amazing creativity of many artists, the multiple partnerships we’ve developed, and the dedicated people who support our work.

We look toward exciting new opportunities for 2019 and invite you to support our mission generously.

​It’s inspiring to know that this year’s Bloomington Early Music Festival was enjoyed by a dramatically expanded audience! Through innovative live-streaming on Facebook and IUMusicLive, more than 25,000 early music fans across the US and around the world were able to watch, in addition to the approximately 4,000 audience members at the concerts. Our new partnership with Early Music America also led to multiple high-profile articles in their quarterly magazine, as well as mentions in blogs and social media posts. This substantially aided our mission to support and showcase the extraordinary talent of emerging artists.

Exciting plans are underway for the 2019 Bloomington Early Music Festival. Besides continuation of our work with partners Early Music America and the IU Historical Performance Institute, we anticipate welcoming three long-standing national organizations - the Lute Society, the Viola da Gamba Society, and the American Recorder Society. Running from May 17-25, BLEMF ’19 promises to be a truly impressive week for early music enthusiasts in Bloomington, the region, and around the globe.

In addition to the festival, we’ve been enjoying a busy 2018-19 season through sponsorship of several projects: Las Aves performed in the IU Salon Latino Chamber series; Alchymy Viols presented two concerts at Trinity Episcopal Church (one with the IndyBaroque Chamber Players); we presented two concerts at the Courthouse; and the popular Bloomington Bach Cantata Project is in the middle of its ninth annual series at St. Thomas Lutheran Church. Finally, our education programming will soon provide performance and teaching residencies at several local elementary schools, thanks in part to a grant from the Bloomington Arts Commission. Let us know if you’d like more information about these programs.

Our efforts to support musicians and present early music to the Bloomington community would not be possible without the support of our donors. We invite you to consider making a generous tax-deductible donation to Bloomington Early Music as you plan your end-of-year giving.

  Thank you for your support of Bloomington Early Music!

Board Members: Alain Barker (President), Adam Dillon (Secretary), Anthony Lanman (Treasurer), Paulina Francisco (Manager), Erica Rubis (Education), Mollie Abels, Aaron Cain, Alison Calhoun, Micah Fleming, Sally Gaskill, Dana Marsh, Reynaldo Patiño, Stanley Ritchie, and Shelley Taylor.

By Peter Jacobi H-T Columnist

When all of the music was over and all my reviews of BLEMF concerts had run in The Herald-Times, I sat down to ponder what I had written.

It was different when, earlier in the process of creation, I sat at the computer and typed out the copy, testing the words with my ears to determine if, in formation, they made sense. It was different when, on completion of the copy, I edited it carefully as I could before sending it for publication. It is normally different when, after covering a single event, I scan the newspaper to see if the review is there and do a read-through, hoping not to find any error that might have slipped through. But post- BLEMF, I had words about a bunch of events, a lot of words, an awful lot.

Of the Bloomington Early Music Festival’s host of concerts, performed over a period of 10 days, most of them clustered during two extended weekends, I managed to attend 10. Sorry to have missed the others, but that was the best I could physically and mentally do.

Because the programs often came in clusters (two or three a day), I determined to write them up in the same manner, in clusters. My aim had been to keep down the length, and I did hold down the amount of space given to each event, striving to include, though often briefly, everything I considered a must.

Well, here I was a few days later, looking through those reviews. My coverage, on reflection, was appropriate; I didn’t shortchange content or performances. I dare to say my writing was decent enough, particularly for copy written in a hurry. But looking at the whole, I concluded that, for most readers, the coverage might seem cluttered. There are so many names of musicians and composers. There are so many titles. There are hasty evaluations etched in, one after another after another.
As festival planner or participant, I’d probably be happy enough with the shape of coverage. Fans of early music who attended, I decided, might want to check personal views against a reviewer’s and read. Fans who didn’t might want to find out what happened and read. The folks in charge would study what I said and appreciate the inches upon inches given to their hard work. Bloomington historians might be grateful for having this record as part of a city scrapbook.

Much of the H-T’s readership, though, would stare at a review’s headline, see the length of the copy beneath, and move on, no different than I perusing the sports pages, satisfied with just the scores. As writer, I might read a sportswriter’s story to study the craft. But I’d have little enthusiasm for a rundown of happenings from inning to inning or period to period. Still, those stories also need to be written. A newspaper serves many masters.

But as I said, I sat there and came to realize that I hadn’t encapsulated my thoughts about this Bloomington Early Music Festival of 2018, the 25th since the celebration came to be and the most extensive in length and substance since changes in leadership, reductions in public enthusiasm, and heavyweight financial problems almost killed it a few years back.

This year’s was a youthful BLEMF, beefed by the inclusion of two young artists programs furnished by Early Music America, a national institution that exists to promote the growth of early music in performance practice and scholarship. The presence of those budding musicians, along with ensembles from important music programs around the nation, helped give the festival a welcome vitality.

Not a single concert I attended was mediocre or of just standard fare. Quality throughout was high, often higher than high. The musicians and their leaders expected only the best from themselves. Pride of accomplishment and joy for attending the festival as working artists could be read into action and spirit. To these visitors, add the presence of IU students and alums and longtime friends, prepared to do battle for the cause. Result: more than 130 musicians contributed to the presentations. The Early Music/Historical Performance field apparently is healthy. BLEMF 2018 was its jubilant reflection.

From the Bloomington end of things, Bloomington Early Music, a combine of locally-based individuals important in and for early music, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music’s Historical Performance Institute were keys in bringing together all the elements of BLEMF 2018, which took important and measurable steps forward from the leaner time.
Alain Barker, executive director of BLEMF in its brightest years, presides over Bloomington Early Music. Dana Marsh serves as chair of the Jacobs School’s Early Music Department and director of its Historical Performance Institute. It is Marsh who consolidated the ties with Early Music America.

How binding those ties will remain, says Marsh, is hard to tell right now, “but it would not be an exaggeration to say that EMA was ecstatic about what our collaboration had to offer at this point in its development, both in terms of future vision and by virtue of what our collaborative model could have to offer a variety of festival situations elsewhere….Everyone benefited equally from this venture. Bloomington gave EMA a far better forum in which to project its interest nationally than has to date been the case in either Boston or Berkley,” sites of the nation’s most prestigious early music festivals, “and at a fraction of the cost. This is especially relevant to the student groups that travelled long distances to be here, who invested heavily their time and energy. I feel we made it very much worth their while.”

Marsh also addressed the addition of streaming opportunities this year: “These provided audiences far away from Bloomington the opportunity to attend events ‘virtually.’” One of BLEMF’s “fathers,” the eminent violinist Stanley Ritchie, was in Australia during the festival but reportedly was able to watch all of the live-streamed events from there.

Barker says the season served as “a break-through moment.” Since its inception, he adds, “The festival has always been a set of partnerships – between students and faculty at IU, between community organizations, with alumni and colleagues in the profession, sometimes with regional and national ensembles, and there’s much to celebrate and admire these past 24 years. However, on a structural level, the organization wasn’t always sure-footed. This year feels different because of the alignment of interests among the partners….I feel more confident than ever that BLEMF can sustain itself.

​“It’s too early,” Barker continues, “to truly know what the significance of this year may mean. My sense, though, is that we can now build towards even greater collaborations, perhaps in partnership with major ensembles and artists, as they develop their passion projects. Bloomington’s ‘special sauce’ for artists who visit is the breathtaking resources we have at our disposal on campus and in this beautiful town. ... We’ll spend the next few months digesting and processing. We’ll plan for next year and beyond and perhaps finally get to the point where a five-year plan is a realistic proposition.”

In other words, right now, the outlook is sunny.