Announcing Max Reger Festival - Bloomington, Indiana

NEW YORK, Sept. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Max Reger Foundation of America (MRFOA) announces it will sponsor a Max Reger Festival in partnership with the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana from September 25th to the 27th, 2015.  All events will be free and open to the public.

Proclaimed "Max Reger Days" by Mayor Mark Kruzan of Bloomington, Indiana, it will be the largest Festival of its kind in the United States. The three-day series will include lectures, master classes, recitals and concerts by internationally renowned musicians and scholars.  "We are most excited by the extensive educational opportunities these events will present, not only for our own students, but pre-college and college/conservatory students from throughout the Midwest. By inviting a broad participation from many schools and music organizations we hope to ignite the imaginations and enlarge the cultural contexts of many young musicians who do not have frequent access to events of this caliber," states Janette Fishell, Chair of the Organ Department at Jacobs.  David V. Cox, Founder and Chairman of MRFOA, also adds that "it is a priority of the Foundation to engage music students in both the primary and secondary schools within the Bloomington area to ensure that they participate in this tremendous opportunity for music education about an exciting but often overlooked composer."

Who was Max Reger and why a festival?  Max Reger (1873-1916) was a pre-eminent and influential modernist composer, pianist, chamber musician, conductor, writer and personality in the early part of the 20th century.  He composed a vast amount of music for all genres except opera and pushed tonality to its limits using his brand of chromaticism without jettisoning to atonality as did his colleagues, like Arnold Schoenberg.  Reger's music is not widely known in the Americas today but was frequently performed throughout the United States during his lifetime.  It is the mission of MRFOA to start a new dialogue about Reger through performances and scholarship.  The Max Reger Festival - Bloomington will feature Reger's music and his unique historical personality as well as music by those who he admired.

These events will recall a musical world now nearly forgotten -- a world of innovation, experimentation, conflict and quirky personalities -- a world that came to an abrupt end after the Great War, in 1918.    For more information visit www.maxreger.org.

SOURCE The Max Reger Foundation of America