Bloomington Early Music Festival 2022:
Celebrating Women
in Early Music
May 22 – 27, 2022
BLEMF 2022 is dedicated to celebrating women in early music, highlighting the presence, influence, and artistry of women across nine centuries of musical culture and music-making. From the convents of the medieval period through the salons of the early 19th century, women participated in music as composers, performers, poets, patrons, and listeners; from positions of political, religious, and social power; in front of audiences and behind the scenes.
BLEMF 2022 gives such women the stage—those long-remembered and those only recently rediscovered—to bring the music they made in their time to our audiences today. BLEMF will be a hybrid festival, offering events both in-person and online, with a grand total of fourteen concert performances and six educational workshops for children and adults.
“I want to show the world, as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry, and that such gifts are never given to women.”
— Maddelena Casulana (c. 1544 - c.1590), Italian composer, lutenist and singer (dedication to her first book of madrigals, to Isabella de' Medici)
With a commitment to diverse approaches to performance and grounding performance in the most current musicological and music historical research, BLEMF has been strengthened through past and current collaborations with national organizations such as Early Music America, internationally renowned scholars at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, and a continued close alliance with the Historical Performance Institute. BLEMF upholds the support of emerging talent as one of our core values and aims to foster the connection between the rich local tradition of early music in Bloomington and the far-reaching global community of early music performers and audiences.
Early Music is defined by BLEMF broadly, encompassing music from the medieval period through the early 19th century, across regional and cultural traditions within and outside of canonical boundaries.
2022 Corporate Sponsors
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