Bloomington Early Music Festival

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! SCHEDULE: OPENING NIGHT! 7:00pm - Live Concert 6:15 - Pre-Concert Discussion ALCHYMY VIOLS Intense Serenity: Music of Vicente Lusitano (Indianapolis, IN)  Sixteenth-century Portuguese composer and music theorist Vicente Lusitano—whom contemporary sources describe as “pardo” (Portuguese for mixed race)—has long been known to music historians, but only over the past few decades has his Blackness been recognized, and even more recently, celebrated. Alongside a well-deserved spotlight on his remarkable works of music and musical theory, Lusitano is now considered the first published Black composer in the Western tradition. A Catholic priest and tutor who in 1551 became ambassador to the Pope in Rome, by 1561, he had married, converted to Protestantism, and relocated to Germany, after which he falls out of the historical record. Through varied permutations in instrumentation and human voices, the renowned ensemble Alchymy Viols brings the intense serenity of the music of Vicente Lusitano to BLEMF audiences with a program of motets, the composer’s single surviving madrigal, and improvisations based on his influential theoretical treatises. Pre-Concert Discussion with Phil Spray, artistic director of Alchymy Viols and Giovanni Zanovello, musicologist & Director of Renaissance Studies, IU. FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, 505 W. 4th Street