Throughout Festival Week, enjoy artwork created by children of families who have recently joined our community, having left their troubled homelands in other parts of the world. The exhibit will encircle the mainstage space at FAR Center from Opening Night, Sunday, through Friday night. During evening performances, you will be surrounded by the visual art of young children who have had to leave their homes behind, while you are immersed in the music of those who had much the same experience so many centuries ago. We are grateful to our new neighbors for sharing their artwork with us and for contributing their talents to our festival. Thank you and welcome to Bloomington!
Schedule:
2:00pm | Workshop
Dance the Flamenco!
¡Baila!
Lean into the rhythms, movements, style & history of this perennially popular dance form derived from Roma, Jewish, Arabic & Spanish folkloric traditions.
Led by Bette Lucas of Bette Lucas Dance Studio
Workshop runs 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Bette Lucas has been teaching Flamenco and Bellydance for many years. She directs the troupes ¡Baila! ¡Baila! Flamenco and The Caravanserai Dancers. She is a flamenco teacher, dancer, and perpetual student, and has had many classes with top flamenco dancers both in Spain and at Festival Flamenco Albuquerque.
Venue: Lotus Firebay 105 S. Rogers Street
5:30pm | Public Screening
Anders Muskens
Incarcerated Music: Sonatas by C.F.D. Schubart
(Weilheim, Germany) Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791) was a German composer, organist, keyboardist, music theorist, poet, journalist, and dedicated activist. Praised by Charles Burney who heard him play organ in Ludwigsburg, Schubart is mostly remembered today as the author of the poem "Die Forelle," which Franz Schubert set to music years later. In an era before true freedom of speech in Germany, Schubart’s published attack on the improprieties of the Jesuits led to his arrest and decade-long confinement in the severe conditions of the Hohenasperg Fortress. During his incarceration, Schubart authored the important treatise "Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst,” (“Ideas for an Aesthetics of Musical Art”) and wrote music and poetry, much of which in the "Sturm und Drang" style. For his political and religious views, Schubart was persecuted: exiled from society, and confined to a cell within a mighty, cold, stone fortress. Yet, in the prevailing spirit of the 18th century, his captors showed a level of Enlightenment leniency and allowed him to publish his art despite his status as a convicted prisoner.
This concert was recorded from within the very cell at the Hohenasperg Fortress where Schubart spent a decade, and wrote much of the music we will hear performed.
Anders Muskens is a Canadian early keyboard specialist and ensemble director, active as an international artist in North America and Europe. He completed an Associate Diploma (ARCT) in modern piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto and a Masters in Fortepiano at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. He is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen where he is researching the connection between rhetorical acting and music in the long eighteenth century. He has performed internationally at festivals and venues including the Utrecht Early Music Festival, the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele, Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the National Music Centre, and the London International Festival of Early Music. Muskens is the founder of Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester, an international initiative to revive the music of the Mannheim School in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Special thanks to the Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg/Museum Hohenasperg for allowing Anders access to the museum to make his recording in the prison where Schubart was incarcerated.
Anders Muskens is a BLEMF Emerging Artist.
5:00pm | Pre-Concert Discussion (screened) with Michael Weinstein-Reiman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), keyboardist and specialist in the German Enlightenmet, and Anders Muskens
Venue: Screening at Lotus Firebay 105 S. Rogers Street
8:00pm | Live Concert
The Raritan Players
Jewish Musicians in 18th-century London
(New Brunswick, NJ) Eighteenth-century London was an especially cosmopolitan city, and a relatively tolerant one, which led Jewish musicians from across Europe—from Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Italian, and Eastern descent—to move there. The Jewish community adopted musical customs of the greater London scene while maintaining their own musical traditions. By the second half of the century, Jewish musicians were performing in opera houses, public concerts, and at the English royal court alongside the leading Christian musicians of their day. While some managers and institutions were accommodating, Jewish musicians sometimes experienced clear anti-Jewish sentiment. By exploring the careers of Jewish figures such as the cellists Jacob and James Cervetto and the singer-composer Harriet Abrams, this concert sheds new light on the themes of exile, diaspora, belonging, and music as a site of self-expression among Jews in eighteenth-century London.
The Raritan Players explore lost performance practices and repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries through engagement with period instruments and new research in musicology. Formed in 2014 and named for the historic Raritan Valley, the area around New Brunswick, New Jersey, the ensemble seeks to breathe new life into untold stories from the musical past. The Raritan Players have revived music and practices associated with little-known figures such as Sara Levy, Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy, Elizabeth Graeme, and Ignatius Sancho. Past recipients of grants from Chamber Music America, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the American Philosophical Society, among others, the Raritan Players' performances and recordings have garnered praise as “simply mesmerizing" (Early Music America) "enchanting" (Classics Today), and an “unexpected treasure” (American Record Guide). Their recording Sisters, Face to Face: The Bach Legacy in Women's Hands received the 2018 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for contributions to historical performance. With Rebecca Cypess (Keyboards), Eve Miller (Cello), Parastoo Heidarinejad & Miranda Zirnbauer (Violin), and Ian Pomerantz & Anne Slovin (Voice).
7:15pm | Pre-Concert Discussion with 18th-century British music specialist Devon Nelson and Raritan Players director Rebecca Cypess
Venue: FAR Center for Contemporary Arts 505 W. 4th Street
