Join us ! BLEMF 2025 offers a weeklong series of concerts & discussions, educational workshops for kids & adults, our 2nd annual BLEMF Community Showcase & New Neighbors Children’s Art Exhibit, and more. Both live & online. Explore our program & mark your calendars!
New Neighbors Children’s Art Exhibit
A partnership with Exodus Refugee Immigration
Evenings at FAR Center for Contemporary Arts
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, May 25th through Thursday night, May 29th. We are thrilled to mount the New Neighbors exhibit for the second year in a row, and we are more grateful than ever to our new young friends for sharing their artwork with us and for contributing their talents to our festival. Thank you and welcome to Bloomington!
Live Concerts & Pre-Concert Talks
Pre-concert discussions take place prior in the same venue.
No tickets or RSVP to attend!
All in-person concert venues are handicap-accessible.
Live Concerts & Pre-Concert Discussions will be livestreamed and available for streaming soon after the festival. See this section below for how to view online.
Virtual Concerts & Public Screenings
All virtual concerts & preconcert discussions will be released for streaming on Opening Night, Sunday, May 25th, and will be available until June 7th. Enjoy them from the comfort of your own home, or from where ever you may be!
Or join us for free public screenings at 5:00 PM Tuesday-Thursday at the Monroe County Public Library (Kirkwood) Auditorium. Bring your friends & family along to enjoy the performances in a comfy & fun theater setting in the heart of downtown!
Schedule:
2:00pm - Workshop
Making Music Books
Printing Presses, Quills & Ink, Part II
Learn about early printing technology from a replica 15th-century Gutenberg printing press, then join in a fun quill & ink making activity to create your own tools for writing the old-fashioned way! In one of our most popular workshops, we are excited to return to the Lilly Library with musicologist and maestro of quill-making Kirby Haugland!
Because sharpening feathers for quills requires a blade, we will have ready-made quills for the kids with a demonstration on cutting them down, and the opportunity for adults to make their own quills at a separate table.
Led by Lilly Library & Kirby Haugland
Workshop runs 2:00pm-3:30pm
Lilly Library
1200 E. 7th Street
Register Here For Making Music Books
5:00pm - Public Screening with Pre-Concert Discussion
Abendmusik
“The Union of All Parties”: Music of Black Composer Sawney Freeman
(New York, NY) A skilled farm worker and fiddle player, Sawney Freeman was enslaved in Lyme, Connecticut, became a runaway in 1790, and was manumitted in 1793. Freeman was also a composer with several of his works included in an early 19th century collection of music which lies in the Trinity College library in Hartford, Connecticut. Viol player, musicologist, and historian of New England musical culture, Loren Ludwig joins the exceptional consort Abendmusik, New York’s Period Instrument String Band, as guest curator for this concert featuring Freeman’s compositions along with music that the composer may have heard and performed.
Pre-Concert Discussion screened at the start of the program
Monroe County Public Library — Downtown
Auditorium
303 E. Kirkwood Avenue
7:00pm - Live Concert
6:15 - Pre-Concert Discussion
Bloomington Spirituals Quartet
Songs of Sorrow & Songs of Jubilee
(Bloomington, IN) The Bloomington Spirituals Quartet explores the powerful and poignant music originated during the dark days of Black bondage in early America. Performed not for an audience but for each other, slave songs and spirituals drew on biblical stories and the experiences of slavery through musical idioms rooted in African culture. This deeply personal and communal music eventually made its way to the concert stage, and the 1870s touring performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers—an ensemble including several formerly enslaved people—sparked an international interest in spirituals less than a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation. Led by members of IU’s highly regarded African American Choral Ensemble, the BSQ draws on the earliest transcriptions of this music in an acapella presentation that celebrates the lineage of slave songs and spirituals from the field to the concert hall.
Pre-Concert Discussion with members of the BSQ and BLEM board member & choral music scholar, Carolann Buff
FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, 505 W. 4th Street
