A Word from Mark Cudek…

Let me start with two words, spoken, no, shouted emphatically and joyously: WE’RE BACK!!! I am thrilled beyond belief to present the lineup for the 2021 Indianapolis Early Music Festival!

Needless to say, it has been incredibly challenging to put together a season with so many variables and unknowns. As you’re all aware, our artists come from all over the country, and abroad, and the approach to COVID until recently has been anything but unified. Consequently, many of our artists are hesitant or unwilling to take the risk to commit to traveling and performing in front of a live audience.

So, Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble has decided to wait until next summer to perform for us. Similarly, Red Dot Baroque is understandably unable to travel from Singapore, but we will get to see and hear them! (More on that in a bit.)

Also, several festivals and concert venues are beginning to rebook performances, and some of our artists are being given opportunities of touring and concertizing in the summer—and, most frustratingly, these bookings are happening as I type this announcement. For example, Early Music Access, who had booked for us, have two members who are in Apollo’s Fire and are committed to performances with that ensemble this summer. One of the members, by the way, is Brian Kay, who played lute and oud on our series with the Peabody Consort and has also performed for us with Hesperus. I was hoping Apollo’s Fire could include a “run-out” to Indianapolis, but they’re still in scheduling mode and unable to commit. Ugh, that’s the sound of me tearing out a little bit more of the hair I have left. Fortunately, quarantining has ruled out going to the barber so it’s easier to grab the now long hair I have! At any rate I am planning to book Early Music Access for 2022.

The one-off programs I am putting together (our Spring Concert with Phil Spray and his Alchymy Viols in May and Marginalia in June) can work live, but I am having to juggle personnel even at this late date! We still don’t even have the singer committed for May 9!!! Rest assured, Phil and I have lots of ideas and backup plans in case we need to find other performers to fill the vacancies. There are some terrific artists in the Chicago area and even closer in Bloomington! But we will present these two shows each with around ten musicians!

To these will be added two more-intimate performances featuring duos, both with easy travel plans, so I can present what begins to look like a normal summer series.

It’s not normal though—unless we’re talking about a new normal or the next normal. The 2021 season resembles our regular series in that we will have three weekends of concerts occurring on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

But in this new normal the Friday evening events are virtual and the Sunday afternoon events are both live/in person and virtual (at least for the second performances at 5:00). It is the new normal in that there are no family concerts—for obvious reasons—and that we have, for the first time, virtual concerts streamed on the web.

I think this shows a very healthy way of flexibly dealing with the pandemic and bringing us back to our audience. And I thank our wonderful Board of Directors for their support. I also hope this will be a way to increase our audience and possibly even make us consider coming back better, in new, unimagined ways for the future!

For example, if we get a good response maybe we will continue to video record and live stream some—or all—of our live events in the future. Who can tell what the next normal will be?

I’m specifically using the term “next normal” because it is the title of Fred Bronstein’s Dean’s Symposium held a few months ago at Peabody (but really everywhere) in response to the Brookings Institution’s report titled “Lost Art: Measuring COVID-19’s Devastating Impact on America’s Creative Economy.”

Based on the Brookings Institution’s analysis of creative occupations, “losses of more than 2.3 million jobs and $74 billion in average monthly earnings for the creative occupations are estimated! . . . Again, creative occupations in the fine and performing arts will be disproportionally affected!”

Dean Bronstein’s symposium included a full-day conference with three guest panels:

1) Artists: Conductor Marin Alsop, who zoomed in from Vienna; Stage and opera director Peter Sellars; New-media artist Thomas Dolby; Pianist Stephen Hough; Jazz trumpeter and Chair of Jazz Studies at Peabody Sean Jones; Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Di Yun.

2) Funders: Directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, and Jerome Foundation.

3) Music leadership: Directors/managers of the Sphinx Organization, Kennedy Center, Opera America, League of American Orchestras, and Chamber Music America.

Thomas Dolby described how technology has always expanded our ability to reach a larger audience, for example, the piano forte; the piano roll; sheet music; records, CDs, and sound files, etc. He said that technology is something that will favor our younger artists giving us a little more hope for the future.

Peter Sellars, my personal favorite, said that “this illness IS the message! It’s about grief and loss. The media don’t have words for it and politicians won’t touch it. It is the job of the artist to deal with and express this! Our task is not to be decorative!” He also said that “improvisation is the way to be alive right now! We’re all improvising in some way or other at this point.”

Sellars expressed hope and pointed out how opera had been dying but has exploded in the last few years, becoming more intimate and more meaningful, especially baroque and contemporary works.

Marin Alsop described how this is the moment when we need art the most.

But the single, biggest take away—from all three panels—was the importance of diversity!

It’s no secret that classical music has been slower to embrace diversity than other kinds of music. Furthermore, early music, a niche of the larger classical music world, has even less diversity than classical music as a whole. I’m proud to say we are slightly ahead of the curve on this one. This summer we will present Wade Davis, a very fine African American baroque cellist; and next summer we will present Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, a racially diverse group of eight terrific singers. We are also fortunate to have on our Board Michael Walker, a gifted African American counter tenor who performed for us in 2018 with Matthias Maute and the Bach Soloists of Minnesota.

We are committed to becoming more inclusive in every realm: audience development, repertoire, board representation, and the artists we present. It is our goal to feature one, or more, artists of color in our festival each year. There are organizations, like the Sphinx Organization in Detroit, that are dedicated to promoting diversity in classical music, and it’s only a matter of time before early music attracts more artists from racially diverse backgrounds. So, just maybe—the future looks good for us in this respect.