Danielle Look:  I wasn't there but my Fiancé was and I've been with him over the course of the years, when we discovered that other people we knew were also at that show. Just to hear them talk about their experience, even though they didn't know each other at the time, they weren't there, it's like they went to the show together.

Ingrid Matthews:  You are having a communal conversation with like twenty-five hundred people, and it feels cool to be able to hear snippets of conversation and be like, "Oh Yes, I know exactly what they're talking about."

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  It was kind of obvious that after two years of Covid, festivals are a way of bringing the community together again, and healing, and feeling like you're part of something larger.

Alex Chambers:  This week on Innerstates, it's Festival Fest: conversations inspired by festivals; how to prepare for a festival; what festivals can do for a community; and a longer conversation about a festival focused on women in early music. Among other things, we hear what the revival of early music has to do with second-wave feminism. That's all coming up, right after this.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome to Innerstates, I'm Alex Chambers, coming to you from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, where spring is rolling towards summer, and that means it's festival season. We have a number of festivals coming up in this part of the world so I thought we'd take this week to think about festivals in general. I know festivals are fun and all, but I don't want you to go wrong in your festival experience. So, I called up and expert to get some festival advice.

 your festival experience. So, I called up and expert to get some festival advice.

Danielle Look:  My best advise when it comes to music festivals is not to wing it, is not to just show up and see what draws you in or looks interesting because you're inevitably going to miss something that you really wanted to see. You might not even know that that thing is going to be there, and that you really want to see it, until you take the time to do the research and to prepare.

Alex Chambers:  This is Danielle Look. She spent a few years as a traveling reporter on the festival circuit. You thought going to a festival was all fun and games didn't you? An escape from regular life where you have to think ahead, plan, maybe put together a spreadsheet? Not so, according to Danielle.

Danielle Look:  I think the key takeaway there is that there might be something there that you really want to see that you're not going to know about, until you take the time to really look at whose playing or what's showing. But half of the fun of going to a music festival - or any festival - is the discovery aspect of it as well, so, you've kind of got to play it both ways in that regard, and be open to deviating from your schedule or from your plan, which could result in a very happy accident in finding something that you still didn't know was going to be there, that you loved.

 The other really big thing that can make or break the experience is weather so, check the weather, do your research, wear comfortable footwear, bring sunscreen, wear a hat, carry an umbrella if the festival will allow you to carry in an umbrella.

Alex Chambers:  The thing is of course...

Danielle Look:  Things are going to happen that you can't predict or that you can't be prepared for.

Alex Chambers:  And some of those aren't going to be great.

Danielle Look:  There was a Rage Against The Machine concert somewhere in Wisconsin, and at this particular venue - it's kind of like Deer Creek Verizon in Indianapolis, the large amphitheater - but they just got tons of rain and the whole thing turned into a mud pit. I wasn't there but my fiancé was and I've been with him over the course of the years, when we discovered that other people we knew were also at that show, and then just to hear them talk about their experience, even though they didn't know each other at the time, it's like they went to the show together.

Alex Chambers:  And maybe that's what it's really about. For all the planning you might do ahead of time, maybe it comes down to that shared experience with a bunch of friends, and strangers, and strangers who become friends. Once, Danielle was at the Forecastle Festival in downtown Louisville. There was a downpour.

Danielle Look:  When they evacuated the festival grounds, we went to the parking garage where we had a cooler with some sandwiches prepared, and lots of other people were hanging out at their cars, maybe they had a cornhole game or something like that. We started just hanging out, making friends. You know, it's not ideal but you've gotta make the most of it, and then eventually you're going to go back into the festival and then maybe you're going to see your parking garage buddies standing in the crowd and it just makes it that much more fun and memorable.

Alex Chambers:  Danielle Look is a Digital Marketer, formally from Indianapolis, now in Denver, Colorado. As I said, Innerstates is all about festivals this week. We've got your film festivals, we've got your music festivals - early music festivals, specifically. We've got your Kurt Vonnegut Festivals... Kurt Vonnegut Festivals?! There might just be one of those. It's called Granfalloon and it's a celebration of regional arts, culture and ideas, here's in Southern Indiana, not far from Kurt Vonnegut's home town of Indianapolis. Vonnegut is a major inspiration for Granfalloon.

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  We try to infuse the festival with Vonnegut's democratic approach to art making, he believed everyone should practice an art, and that's what we try to celebrate at the festival.

Alex Chambers:  This is Ed Dallis-Commentale.

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  I'm a Professor of English at Indiana University, I'm also the Associate Vice Provost for Arts and Humanities and the Director of the Arts and Humanities Counsel. Vonnegut is such an interesting character for us; he's really an interesting figure for Indiana and the Midwest. He's a famous dropout, I mean, he failed High School, he failed College. He didn't really do that well in the Army even, as famously documented in Slaughterhouse Five but, he was a persistent writer and thinker, and he was an incredibly self-educated man and he inspired an entire generation to think critically about the world around them.

 I think a lot of people are drawn to him, particularly a lot of young people, because he paved his own way as an intellect and a writer, and I think that's the spirit that we try to get here through the Granfalloon.

Alex Chambers:  At which there will be concerts and readings, crafts, theater.

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  Out on the street on June 4th, some of my favorite things is there's going to be a haiku death match, where people can write poetry out on the streets - that's going to definitely be a blast. There's a nature tour of the century: people will be taking a tour with a giant Vonnegut puppet and they could be writing their thoughts about nature and the environment and then submitting them to a time capsule.

Alex Chambers:  Festivals are about coming together, whether it's for music or literature or a nature tour with a giant puppet, and in one sense, that's what Granfallooning is all about. Vonnegut coined the term.

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  And a granfalloon is essentially a group of people whose association is meaningless but still takes on meaning for them, and Vonnegut was really suspicious of granfalloons. He defined a number of granfalloons such as any nation, anywhere. This is an ironic concept for him, he believes that people often get too zealous about their connections and their communities. At the same time, Vonnegut really yearned for community. He grew up in Indiana with a German family, and he often throughout his life felt like he missed home and he missed the community that nurtured him. So it's a bittersweet concept for Vonnegut, and we try to capture both the cynical and the optimistic side of granfallooning with our festival.

Alex Chambers:  Certain big festivals are probably not that helpful for the places where they happen. They bring tons of people in and then they pack up and leave, but Ed says festivals can also do a lot for their communities.

Ed Dallis-Commentale:  It's kind of obvious that after two years of Covid, festivals are a way of bringing the community together again, and healing and feeling like you're a part of something larger, and something larger than yourself that isn't negative. We could all feel like we were a part of Covid or the war in Ukraine, but this is an attempt to kind of bring the community together for a positive sense of who we are, and to investigate our past, present and future. Festivals are interesting, they're kind of popping up for decades now, all across the world, particularly with music as their focus, but I think one of the things that we're seeing is that communities are pushing at the borders of our arts and cultures institutions, and they're thinking of new ways of sharing creative activity, whether it's music or art or dance performance. I think that festivals, though they seem as ad-hoc and they seem random when they pop up, I think they express a sort of dissatisfaction with like the traditional modes of creative exchange.

 Communities are exploring the ways in which they want to think about themselves and their creative activity. I like watching the festival circuit and how festivals rise and fall, and what they're trying to express as they pop up. But going back to Vonnegut and his spirit, I cant think of any other author that appeals so directly to both the left and the right ends of our political spectrum. There's an incredibly compelling version of Vonnegut as a counter-cultural hero, a sort of post-modern hippy hero in some way, but on the other hand, there's a version of Vonnegut that really appeals to the conservative element in our state - a Vonnegut who kind of appreciates traditional German culture, small government. There are certain things throughout his work that, I think, make sense to the other side of the spectrum in a more traditional way.

 What's interesting about this fest. Is it brings all types. Everyone that we meet at the festival has had a moment where they fell in love with Vonnegut, and Vonnegut shaped their thinking in some way, and that's incredible common ground for a community that often feels divided, and it's great to be able to talk about some of those issues through Kurt Vonnegut's work. So I think that that speaks to the local element of this in a really productive way.

Alex Chambers:  Granfalloon runs in Bloomington, Indiana, June 1st through to 5th. You're listening to Innerstates. When we come back we'll talk about how late music can be and still be early. Stick around.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Innerstates, I'm Alex Chambers.

Alex Chambers:  Back in 18th-century France, Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre was a renowned musician. As Mozart would be, she'd been trotted around as a child prodigy. Also like Mozart, she grew up to be an incredibly talented composer, she was one of very few composers allowed to dedicate her work to King Louis XIV: the Sun King was particular. Her violin sonatas were these groundbreaking large scale works, unlike anything her contemporaries were doing.

Ingrid Matthews:  Highly creative, rhythmically, harmonically, formally.

Alex Chambers:  Unlike Mozart, you probably haven't heard of her.

Ingrid Matthews:  I do believe that if there were no first name attached to those sonatas, we would have known those pieces all along as a really important part of the violin literature. Because they were written by someone named Elisabeth, they've only recently come to be appreciated for what they are.

Alex Chambers:  This is Ingrid Matthews.

Ingrid Matthews:  I'd just moved to Bloomington last Fall to join the Faculty of the Jacobs School of Music. I'm teaching Baroque violin in the Historical Performance Institute.

Alex Chambers:  And she is also a Board Member of Bloomington Early Music. Ingrid came into the studio a couple of weeks ago, with Suzanne Melamed...

Suzanne Melamed:  I am President of Bloomington Early Music.

Alex Chambers:  To talk about the Festival, which starts Sunday, May 22nd, and runs through Friday, May 27th. Their theme this year is celebrating women in early music. I invited them in to tell me about the festival, but we ended up talking about a lot more than just the list of events. We talked about women in early music, women like Francesca Caccini, composer and music teacher for the Medicis in early 17th-century Italy; Barbara Strozzi, an Italian singer and composer from around the same time; and Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, whose name I just want to hear over and over again.

Ingrid Matthews:  Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre.

Alex Chambers:  Thank you Ingrid. Moving on, we talked about how late you can go and still be early, is Beethoven early music? Brahms? I didn't even bring up Stravinsky. We also talked about music as art, where it's about expressing intense emotions versus music as craft, where there's artistry to it, but it's also kind of a job. But before we get to that, I think we should hear about the group that got this whole thing going, shouldn't we?

Suzanne Melamed:  Bloomington Early Music was founded in 1992, by Stanley Ritchie, the renowned pedagogue who Ingrid studied with, and then a year or so later the festival took root. It was originally a community music organization and then the organization started working with HPI, the Historical Performance Institute, at the time called The Early Music Institute. That was nearly 30 years ago, and from then on, the festival has been active, aside from a couple of years, and then it came roaring back. This year, post-pandemic, we are exploding the festival in a number of directions, and one of the big changes is this turn towards focusing on a theme - women being the first time I believe we've done such a thing - and that is really to talk about the question of why is an early music festival still relevant? Why is this something people should be interested in who aren't already early music aficionados, and isn't that just music for dead white men?

 In fact, it isn't. Nobody's going to say that women were more powerful or more influential than they were but, the fact is that we were there and there was a lot that was going on, and women were able to overcome obstacles and boundaries and to have great success, and produce absolutely marvelous, beautiful music.

Alex Chambers:  I want to talk more about women in early music but before we get to that, can one of you just orient us to early music itself?

Ingrid Matthews:  The term "early music" is an interesting term and nowadays people have kind of shifted more towards the language of "historical performance" - you will hear those terms kind of interchangeably. The concept of it is not just that it's "old" music, but the salient point is to play this music as closely as we can to the way it would have been performed at the time that it was written, and that sheds a lot of light on the music. For instance, to play Bach on the kind of violin that was in use when he was writing, sheds so much light on that music and it helps you to get inside the composer's psyche almost, to use the equipment that they would have known, and so we kind of end up in this really fascinating area between scholarship and artistry, because any performance needs to be vibrant and alive in the present moment for a living, breathing audience, but we also want it to have the integrity of being truly informed, to the best of our ability, by what we know about the history of the period.

Alex Chambers:  And is there tension between those two things?

Ingrid Matthews:  I don't think so. For me it makes a performance more lively, to come at it from this point of view. If you look at Bach from the future, through Tchaikovsky and Brahms - I'm just using all the big names - Bach might seem almost kind of dinky, but if you look at Bach or any other composer from behind, from the composers that preceded them, then you see what's revelatory about any music that you play, and there's a freshness and a life to that, that I think comes across and can be felt by the audience, even if they have no idea about any of these things I'm talking about.

Suzanne Melamed:  I think it's also important to recognize that we have, as our posters say, nine centuries of music. Early music is a very broad stretch of time so, we're going from Byzantine chant all the way up to the early 19th century and there is question about where does the term end. "How late is early?" one could say. We've chosen to put that at the early 19th-century for many reasons, a lot of them based on scholarship, on a switch from musicians as artisans to artists. From people who worked for churches and what not to people who were independent - freelance workers so to speak. It really pivots on Beethoven in a way although both Heiden and Mozart were doing some freelancing as well. It also hinges on how people listen to music, what kinds of things were people listening for and from Beethoven forward, it was almost an autobiographical thing.

Suzanne Melamed:  What was the composer feeling, or what were they thinking? What did they believe? And because Beethoven, with his angst and his circumstances, was a very angry person, you could listen for that. Then people started retroactively applying that to earlier music, and wondering "What was Bach thinking?" or "What did he believe?" Well, he was an artisan. He believed many things but is that really what he was doing with the music or was he basically fulfilling his job?

Alex Chambers:  Can you tell me a little bit more about this distinction between the artisan and the freelancer? It's interesting to realize that this historical juncture or line that the scholars have come up with turns partly on questions of work and labor.

Suzanne Melamed:  It hinges also I think on art for art's sake - absolute music. Hanslick, who was a philosopher in that era of art as an political or social instrument or as a job, as opposed to because you're inspired and you want to create great art. Potentially, many men were trained in conservatory situations - the Neapolitan Conservatories for example which were originally places where orphans were trained to do jobs, so you had a shoe making conservatory and you had a music conservatory. There were three of four different varieties and I've forgotten what the other ones are. So children were trained to create this music, like the way we learn language, with these chunks, like little tropes of music and combining them and recombining them and just becoming fluent in a way that is so rare today.

 The training is so different. I'm talking about something called portamento, it's such a different way making music or art as your job. It's still a job but this concept of being the artist and having these visions wasn't really as much the case in earlier times. An artisan will create a beautiful door, something that's functional, and they'd carve these gorgeous things in it, so that it could function as a door that gives the person looking at it this sense of "What's behind it? How does it function? What is it trying to represent?" Whereas an artist will just create the carving and maybe someone would put it on the door. Does that make sense?

Alex Chambers:  No, I think that makes a lot of sense, it's this idea of self-expression I think versus some sort of combination between the functionality and the expression. Ingrid, do you want to add something?

Ingrid Matthews:  Well there's another interesting dimension to that same question of how we get to Beethoven being the tortured artist figure that we now see him as, which has to do with the active improvisation which was a really important part of music-making, all through the Baroque period. In fact what we call the Baroque Period, 1600 to 1750, is defined by the use of something called basso continuo which is a practice of improvisation. It's when we get just towards the end of the 18th century, and the advent of public concerts and composition had reached a point of complexity and virtuosity that improvisation was no longer really practical, and so the composer really rises up as a figure in his own right, whereas prior to that time, composers were players, and there wasn't really the separation.

 Over in the Jacobs School right now, somebody will be either a composition major or a performance major, but I think it's quite rare to find somebody's who's really doing the whole act of being a musician in that way. It would have been assumed in the 17th and earlier 18th centuries that composers all played instruments, and therefore the "composer" wasn't this exalted figure that the composer became later, which goes hand in hand with those kinds of changes and the way we look at the craft of music-making that Suzanne was talking about.

Suzanne Melamed:  Yes it's rare now to find people who can do all those different facets of music making, because the training isn't necessarily there - you're either a composition major or a performance major and there's not many programs that I know of that would combine those two.

Ingrid Matthews:  Well we live in such a different world and that's why it's so interesting and inspiring to look back at these nine centuries of how music was made and what we can learn from that, what ideas we can get from this musical, artistic, and historical adventure.

Suzanne Melamed:  Yes it's true. Ingrid you mentioned the public concert hall coming in the late 18th century and that's a difference also. We weren't in an era where people sat in an audience were perfectly still and perfectly quiet, wearing all black like we are, not clapping when they wanted to but clapping at the end. That is a 19th-century convention and again, just like these other ways of reading into music from earlier on, now people sit there in perfect stone silence and are afraid to make noise, or if you cough, you're scolded by the people in front of you, and it wasn't as stiff, formal a thing. Even as late as Liszt, who would have recitals where he would pass around a vase or a basket or something and people would write down what they wanted him to play, and they'd throw it in and then he'd pick it out and just play whatever.

 There's also this question of what's actually on the page. The score or text as "this is what you should play." You just had a few signals on the page basically, and a lot of people just played from that, because of their training earlier on. So there's a lot of differences in the way music was played, the way it was listened to, where it was listened to and how. That's kind of why we make that break in the early 19th century because it just became a very different endeavor.

Alex Chambers:  I'm thinking about what you were just describing about, like how we think about jazz a lot now and how it seems like it just became a lot more formal and formalized in the early 19th century.

Suzanne Melamed:  I'm nodding my head. Yes.

Ingrid Matthews:  Early music, I do want to say, can certainly apply to Beethoven and later. I would say that you could apply that term to any period which is using different sort of equipment than we would unthinkingly use today. A Beethoven piano is very different from a modern Steinway, and the Brahms violin sonatas would have been played on gut strings. So even just a shift like that is going to open up a new sound world and a new aesthetic and so for some people, anything that could possibly fall under the umbrella of that concept could be considered early music. But I think nine centuries is enough for our purposes right now.

Suzanne Melamed:  Yes and that's where the term "historical performance practice" comes in, because even if it's early 20th century, you can apply historical performance practice with a different set of circumstances or whatever they were doing. If you think about the progression of Bach, we look at what the circumstances were at the time and just thinking about the number of players or singers. Bach was kind of underground for a little while and then was revived in the 19th century by Felix Mendelssohn, but he revived it in a 19th century style, with massive forces, meaning lots of singers - not just one on a part or two on a part. When you hear the B Minor Mass at Lincoln Center for example, there's a hundred singers and that is a glorious, amazing experience. It's just mind-boggling and just so uplifting.

 It's also really instructive and glorious and wonderful to hear it with one person on a part, where the singers are often covered over by the instrumentalists and you can't always hear what they're singing, and that is the way it was done. I think the tension arises with the historical performance movement where, particularly in the 1970's, there was an attempt to say "This is the way it should be done." Now I think people say, this is a way and it's something that's really useful to know, and to hear, and to experience and to understand, and then go off and do it with a hundred singers. But experience what it was so that you can kind of make your choices in that way as someone whose producing the music, and for an audience also, you get so much out of both ways.

Alex Chambers:  So, I wonder if, as you worked on developing the festival, were there particular women or stories that you came across that you were excited to realize existed?

Ingrid Matthews:  Some of the women from the 17th and 18th centuries that I was most excited to present - and all of these women will be represented in the festival - are people like Francesca Caccini, who at one point was the highest-paid musician at the Medici Court; she was a big-shot. Now, her name is completely overshadowed by that of her Father, Giulio Caccini, but in her lifetime, she was a really important performer, virtuoso singer and important composer. Or Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre at the Court of Louis XIV, who was again, just a renowned musician. She, like Mozart, had been kind of trotted around as a child prodigy when she was young and then became a really, really important figure.

Ingrid Matthews:  But my bias, as a violinist, has to do with her violin sonatas which were absolutely groundbreaking - the first published in France and large scale works far beyond anything that any of her contemporaries were doing. So yes, these are just a few of the stories I'm excited about.

Suzanne Melamed:  There's one ensemble that we have playing for us there from The Hague in The Netherlands, and they're called West End Winds and they put together what to me is a really striking program, and that is wind band music from the late 18th century, towards the end of our period and wind instruments. Everything from brass to woodwind were the domain of men, particularly woodwinds have their roots in military bands; women were not really allowed to play. Women played keyboard, they played string instruments, they sang, but you weren't supposed to be blowing on a horn. So that changed in the 19th century but it was not an appropriate posture for women as you can imagine.

 So, this ensemble traced the performance careers of four or five female performers who went against that grain and actually played in public and had careers as performers on wind instruments, and what did they play and where they played it. One of them moved from Germany to the United States and the reviews were often quite sexist. Yes she played pretty well "for a woman" or it was really not appropriate, that sort of thing. I just thought that was so interesting because we think mostly of composers, rather than the performers who also went around the edges and found ways to make their music and to have an impact, despite being derided or reviewed negatively and just making it happen for them.

 So that was really inspiring to me; to see that, and this group of five young female musicians, in The Netherlands, who have dedicated their ensemble to recreating this music, it was impressive.

Ingrid Matthews:  The theme of this year's festival, Women in Early Music is just such a wonderful theme and there's kind of an imbalance to be corrected. To state the obvious, I think the genius of women has been overlooked in the western world and now we are seeing attempts to correct that in all kinds of arts organizations. Among those, I think early music and early music presenters have a really interesting role to play, since we're kind of all about history and what's happened in the past that we cannot change, but I think early music does play a special role. In this country it's interesting to note that what we call the "early music revival" was taking place in the 60's, 70's, concurrently with the Civil Rights Movement, Sexual Revolution, Feminism.

 I really like to think that early music carries with it some of that same energy that has kind of a subversive energy, that has the potential to crack open some rigid systems that may have outgrown their usefulness and create a world in which musicians of every gender are free to pursue the careers that they're meant to manifest.

Alex Chambers:  Ingrid has a theory about why the early music revival happened alongside the struggles for civil rights and womens liberation.

Ingrid Matthews:  I think, politically and socially, there was a questioning of authority, and the way that manifested in music had to do with the hierarchies. Classical music had solidified into an extremely hierarchical structure, with orchestras having an almost militaristic level of who's allowed to speak to whom in the chain of command. Early music turned that upside down and created a world in which female Music Directors - for instance like Monica Huggett of Portland Baroque Orchestra, or Jeannette Sorrell of Apollo's Fire, or Jeanne Lamon of Tafelmusik, or myself, with Seattle Baroque Orchestra - have been able to enjoy flourishing careers in leadership with an ease that would have not been possible prior.

Suzanne Melamed:  I wonder if the presence of women in leadership roles in early music outweighs that of women in leadership roles in the broader classical world?

Ingrid Matthews:  The percentage of female conductors, if you looked at a percentage of modern orchestras, I'm sure it would be quite a tiny percent, where as Baroque orchestras, I would say, we could easily be 50% female-led. THat's a significant difference, so I think our field has played a certain role in opening things up.

Suzanne Melamed:  Especially as we have this theme this year, with women in early music, having that presence of women in leadership roles, sets early music up as a model for people to look back in history and see what was actually going on as opposed to what history handed down to us - what stories were erased, marginalized, overlooked, or just flat-out denied?. How many women had to sign their compositions with their brother's name or something like that? I think having that perspective of women in leadership predisposes early music to look at that stuff with a more fresh and open mind.

Alex Chambers:  Well thank you both so much for being here and talking about all this stuff, and I'm really excited about the festival.

Ingrid Matthews:  Thank you for having us.

Suzanne Melamed:  Yes, thank you so much.

Alex Chambers:  That was Ingrid Matthews and Suzanne Melamed, from Bloomington Early Music. Their festival runs Sunday, May 22nd through Friday, May 27th, with live and online performances and workshops. You're listening to Innerstates. Up next, film festivals as a form of community service. Stick around.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Innerstates. I'm Alex Chambers and it's time for our regular segment on movies in the Midwest, with our friend down the hill, the Director of the Indiana University Cinema, Alicia Kozma. When we recorded, Alicia didn't know this episode was gonna be about festivals. I didn't know this episode was gonna be about festivals, but she must have had a feeling when she came in a few weeks ago, because she said to me...

Alicia Kozma:  Today I wanted to talk a little bit about film festivals.

Alex Chambers:  And I said, "Great."

Alicia Kozma:  So I think most listeners are familiar with the general idea of film festivals.

Alex Chambers:  There's Sundance, Tribeca, TIFF, which is in Toronto...

Alicia Kozma:  But outside of those big names, I think what's sometimes less understood is that there are a wide variety and types of film festivals.

Alex Chambers:  Festivals like Sundance are from a certain perspective, giant business meetings, where Directors showcase their films to try to get distributors to pick them up.

Alicia Kozma:  Other festivals like TCM, a classic film-fest is exactly that. It's a place for classic films to be shown, but also a place for showing restored classic films -so films that you would necessarily not have been able to have seen before because they weren't in a condition to be screened, but they've been restored by the Turner Classic Movie Foundation or some other entity, and they premier the restorations there.

Alex Chambers:  And is that a particular location?

Alicia Kozma:  It's in LA, and so because it's in LA, it gets all the fancy-shmancy people there. For example this year they're showing ET for its 40th Anniversary, with Steven Spielberg and Drew Barrymore, and a bunch of other people that were in the film. Then there's more narrow-casted, focused film festivals - something like BlackStar Film Festival in Philly, which is an amazing organization that's both a film festival but also a year-round programming entity that's focused only on Black, brown and indigenous film makers and their films. So you get a big wide variety of the types of film festivals that you can have, and also reasons that they exist. There's lots more types, but one of the types I think is pretty critical, that I wanted to talk about today are regional film festivals.

Alex Chambers:  Glad to hear it.

Alicia Kozma:  I'm becoming, for someone from New York, quite the shill for the Midwest, thanks to this show, Alex. Thankfully there's a lot of good things here to talk about, that makes it super easy. So regional film festivals, they're exactly what they sound like: they are film festivals that are dedicated or constructed by region, but because they're regional I think people often tend to write them off, although they have a lot of value. Regional film festivals matter for a couple of reasons: firstly, they provide incredible cultural and economic development for a city. Regional film festivals often don't just exist as film festivals, they maintain a presence, in the community that they're in, for a really year-round kind of presence. One of my favorite film fests to go to, in the world, is in Columbia, Missouri, and it's called the True/False Documentary Film Fest. It's truly incredible, I have seen some of the best and my favorite movies that I've ever seen in Columbia, Missouri.

 Regional Film Festivals oftentimes provide a venue for films that don't make it to big chain theaters, especially big chain theaters in the Midwest, or even smaller Art House theaters in the Midwest and definitely not streaming services. So in most cases, they are the only place that you can truly see something anywhere, and that is maybe their best kept secret - there are films there that you will read about, and you will hear about, and you will see nominated for "Best Foreign Picture" or "Best Documentary" and you'll say, "Hey I've never heard of that movie", but they were definitely playing it down the road at your local regional film festival, a couple of months earlier.

Alex Chambers:  In what sense are regional film festivals regional, are they drawing on movies from a particular region?

Alicia Kozma:  So they're regional in the sense that they're location-based, and that they are bringing films from a wide variety of places to their region, not based on a specific programming theme, not based on a specific identity or a narrow-casted audience, but based on the fact that they want this type of arts and culture in their specific geographic region. So it's kind of like film is community service essentially.

Alex Chambers:  And these films could be from anywhere - they're not necessarily from that region?

Alicia Kozma:  They're from anywhere, but I will tell you one of the nice things about regional film festivals is they always have a section representing their state or their region in competition, because they're really good like that. They like to rep the home turf like at True/False in Colombia, they have two sections - one of Missouri filmmakers and then another section just of filmmakers from University of Missouri. So yes, regional film festivals are an essential link in the industry chain, they generate a lot of press, they generate audience engagement and they showcase new and up and coming artists, oftentimes regional artists. But one of my favorite things, and one of the things that has become so critical about regional film festivals in these last three years, is that they actually are a way for small and engaged local audiences to have a say in constructing their own film culture. Because, it's not just, "Am I gonna choose from seeing Sonic 2 at AMC 1 or Sonic 2 at AMC 2?" You actually get a really robust slate of programming to choose from, and it's programming that you are directly supporting, by being in attendance.

 Think back to everything that you watched over the course of the pandemic. How much of it was driven solely by access, and how much of that access is now driven by algorithms, or what movie theaters are still open, or what type of variety they're willing or not willing to bring. Regional film fests break that algorithm open; they give you a pathway to go around it. You're not suffering between watching Love is Blind 1 or Love is Blind 1 UK. Not that you shouldn't watch those! You can go and find a whole roster of things that you didn't even know existed, and that don't necessarily have to be suggested to you, by an algorithm that shows you what's Netflix's Top 10. You actually know that people are thinking about and curating these things and bringing you these films for a reason, and you have a plethora of movies to choose from.

 Unsurprisingly, there are lots of awesome regional film festivals in the Midwest, so, I talked about True/False, which is every March, and I cant recommend enough that people go. It's amazing. But there are two a little bit closer: one in Indianapolis, and one in Champaign, Illinois. So in Indianapolis, right here in our backyard we have the Heartland Film Festival, so Heartland's been around since 1991, they just celebrated their 30th Anniversary, which for a regional film festival is truly phenomenal, and they deserve every accolade. Their programming is off-the-wall great. They played more than 300 films this October, in person and in hybrid. They're a really vibrant mix of that big name kind of Art House title that wont screen anywhere else, international films and really importantly, premiers of new work, by up and coming artists, either international, local, regional, or whatever.

 They bring everything to the table. They are actually super affordable to attend, you don't have to spend a million dollars: you can go and watch one movie, you can buy a pass, you can watch three movies. You get to choose your own adventure essentially, from this really beautifully created slate of films that they bring you. So it's every October, so there's time to go for next year, and it's a very easy drive away and a lovely weekend trip as well, and I'm really looking forward to next year as well, because they do a phenomenal job. The second is Ebertfest - the name might sound familiar, and it should. Ebertfest is actually happening next weekend, a little further away from Indianapolis; it's in Champaign, Illinois and it was started by the legendary Roger Ebert. He started it in 1999, and he started it specifically to highlight films that he thought were overlooked, either by distributors, by critics, or by audiences, and he really wanted to make sure that those films got a second chance at being appreciated.

 He called it at first the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival. It kind of just evolved into being EbertFest and it's now a little bit more than a film fest - there's panels, there's workshops, there is a new Ebert Film Center that's developing in conjunction with the festival. But one of the really unique things about EbertFest, and one of the reasons I like it so much, is that unlike every other film festival, they only show one film at a time. So the biggest problem with going to film festivals is that you constantly have to choose what you want to see, and you're always missing out on something, simply because no one should watch 14 movies in a day. You just cant sit down for that long, and your eyes start to hurt, and it's terrifying, and you're always missing something, or you're always running and catching half of something or missing the beginning of something else.

 Roger was so committed to the fact that people really needed to see these movies, that they only play one movie at a time, and they play it in this old historic movie palace theater with a balcony and amazing projection and so one, you never miss anything and two, everyone is watching the same things, all the time. Everyone watches a movie; everyone piles out of the theater into like this street that's closed off in front of it. There's food and there's coffee and there's cocktails and everyone's talking, and you are having like a communal conversation with like 2500 people and you've all just seen the same thing. And it feels cool to be able to hear snippets of conversation and be like, "Oh yes, I know exactly what they're talking about!" or just join in another random conversation with your own thoughts, because everyones talking about the same thing. So it's really nice; there's no fear of missing out with EbertFest. And since it was started by Roger, it gets a lot of swanky guests that wouldn't normally hang out in East-Central Illinois.

 So this year Guillermo del Toro's gonna be there, actually for the second time and he's showing a black-and-white version of his Oscar nominated film, Nightmare Alley and Ramin Bahrani going to be there, who's a personal directorial favorite of mine. I strongly recommend checking out his films, but only if you like watching movies about how capitalism is destroying the world, but they're amazing movies nonetheless.

Alex Chambers:  Who doesn't like those kinds of movies?

Alicia Kozma:  That's what I say.

Alex Chambers:  If you want to understand the world.

Alicia Kozma:  Listen Alex, my students would strongly disagree, but there are people that don't like those types of movies! He's incredible, and tons of other guests are gonna be there too. It's a really great opportunity to see a bunch of really cool movies that you may have overlooked, new versions of films that you saw, that you get to watch in a new way, and be in really close proximity and potentially even bump into, artists and filmmakers and storytellers that you really like. I know sometimes it often feels like we don't have a choice in the options that we have for watching stuff, it's prequel one or sequel two or whatever and while theres nothing wrong with those, it doesn't mean that's what audiences want to watch forever.

 Regional film festivals really bring that diversity and that surprisingness that you get when you see a film that you had no idea what to expect, and you walk out loving it, and you can't imagine never having seen it before, and you cant wait to watch it again, they're really great at that. So, this is a way for us to help them do that. You can buy a ticket or you can buy a pass, you can spend a night, you can spend the weekend and you can just see some really great stuff. And maybe Guillermo del Toro, who knows?

Alex Chambers:  Indiana University's Cinema Director, Alicia Kozma. Go to a Film Festival, be prepared, make a spreadsheet - unless you're going to EbertFest, you wont need a spreadsheet for that. Alright speaking of planning, let's get back to Danielle Look and wrap up with the unexpected. She went to this mountain-top music festival in West Virginia.

Danielle Look:  And we had gone to see one of our favorite bands and they were the headliner on Saturday night, so they had an o'clock time slot, that was on [INAUDIBLE]. It was really unique because the band that played after them was a bluegrass band, and that was just different because bluegrass is usually like a daytime set, so to put them on after this hard rock jam headlining set was unique. So we watched that and then by the time we got back to camp after those shows, it was getting close to being time for the sun to come up. We happened to be not that far from the very top of the mountain, and so it was just a quick little hike up the rest of the mountain and we got up there, just before the sun came up, it was like twilight. So, we were literally higher than the clouds in the sky; because of the time of day and the temperature, all of the clouds had sunken down into the valley at the top of the mountain over there. We just sat there and as the sun started to come up and get a little bit warmer, the clouds started to lift and then we were in the clouds, we were in a fog, and then we went back and definitely went to bed after that.

 Now I live in Colorado and I'm on mountains all the time but it's rare that I'm on top of a mountain before the sun comes up, and to have that vantage point and to watch the clouds rise like that and just kind of crawl up the mountain, that was an experience I'll never forget. That's what I think is special about music festivals for a lot of people - it just feels magical in a way and it has to do with that being in a different part of the world with people who are strangers but friends at the same time, and you all have the same desires and lifestyle and just go have your own private little corner of the world for a few days, and that's really special and magical.

Alex Chambers:  So, if you can, go find a little corner of the world where you can meet some strangers and become friends. It doesn't have to be a festival, but who knows, maybe you'll make it one. You've been listening to Innerstates from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. If you have a story for us or you've got some sound we should hear, let us know at WFIU.org/innerstates. Speaking of found sound, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first, the credits. Innerstates is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Eoban Binder, Aaron Cain, Mark Chilla, Michael Paskash, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is John Bailey. Special thanks this week to Danielle Look, Ed Dallis-Commentale, Suzanne Melamed, Ingrid Matthews and Alicia Kozma. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music by the Artists at Universal Production Music. The early music you heard was selections from violin sonatas by none other than Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre - I got to say it again. That was performed by Ingrid Matthews, Byron Schenkman and Margiet Tindemans. Alright, let's listen to something.

Alex Chambers:  You've been listening to the zesting of a lemon, recorded, as usual, in Bloomington, Indiana. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.