Three Jacobs-affiliated composers will launch Overtuned Fest from Feb. 23 through Feb. 26 in partnership with the IU Student Composers Association. The four-day event will feature one concert each night, showcasing genre-bending musical works across Bloomington.
The birth of Overtuned Fest began about a year and a half ago when recent Jacob’s doctoral graduate Alexey Logunov had an idea to create an ensemble featuring instruments from rock and metal. He thought the ensemble should use those instruments to create experimental music which merges the genre’s sounds.
The musicians joining the project initially all came from classical backgrounds, but showed interest in expanding their musical range. So, the co-artistic directors — doctoral student Christopher Herz, along with recent graduates Jee Won Kim and Logunov — decided to mostly focus on merging classical music with other popular genres.
The large ensemble quickly broke out into multiple groups as the project expanded, creating two additional smaller ensembles to go alongside.
Not just inspired by the amount of interest in experimentation, the trio began organizing Overtuned Fest because they wanted to give more opportunities to talented artists and create something new for the Bloomington community.
“It started from just ensemble. It turned out to be a new music festival,” Logunov said. “Our idea is to keep developing it, even once the festival concludes this February, we still want to keep working on the ensemble, on educational programs.”
As the idea turned into something bigger, the trio began looking for support around Bloomington and on the campus, hoping to transform Overtuned Fest into something more attainable.
Overtuned Fest was eventually made fully possible when IU’s Jacobs School of Music awarded them the Community Impact Grant 2026 from the Office of Entrepreneurship and Career Development, and Constellation Studios gifted them an Open Stage grant, which subsidizes the cost of performances in hopes of more local exhibitions of art.
Constellation Studios is supporting the first concert on Feb. 23 at 7 p.m., hosting the event at Waldron Rose Firebay Theater and providing resources like the grant for the performance.
The first concert is titled “Overtuned: Prologue, featuring Rock Band Ensemble,” and will feature a standard rock and roll ensemble with guitar, bass, drums, vocals and keyboard. It will last two hours and feature original music by musicians within the ensemble.
“Reimaging Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’” is the title of the second concert on Feb. 24, housed within Indiana Memorial Union’s Whittenberger Auditorium at 7 p.m. Lasting an hour, the concert will feature “Winterreise,” a classical composition by Franz Schubert composed in 1827, interspersed throughout original music and melodies based on the original work.
The next concert is titled “Featured Artist Recital: JIJI, guitar,” and features Jiji Kim, an associate professor of music in guitar at IU and worldwide acclaimed classical guitarist. Her recital will start at 6 p.m. Feb. 25 at Pillar Arts Performance Space in the Arts Alliance Center.
The final concert of the festival is titled “Rock Sinfonia, featuring Chamber Orchestra with Visual Media.” This last concert will begin at 7 p.m. Feb. 26 at Switchyard Park Pavillion, serving as the festival’s large-scale ensemble performance due to the larger number of musicians in the ensemble.
“Rock Sinfonia” will be performed by a sinfonietta ensemble, a pared down orchestra to its most basic components, with only one musician per part.
Each concert will feature visuals created specifically for the pieces, balancing the music and exciting graphics.
“Composers collaborated with visual artists, and so four composers and four visual artists,” Kim said. “And then visual artists created visuals after composers finished their pieces.”
As the debut of Overtuned Fest approaches, the ensembles and guest artists have been practicing almost every day. The trio is excited to share their experimentation with Bloomington, creating something new for the community.
“Every piece is just so unique and presents a completely different approach to the instrumentation and the overall aesthetic we’re coming from,” Herz said. “So, for me, it’s just, I mean, all about the music, really.”
All Overtuned Fest events are free, only requiring guests to RSVP on their calendar link. For more information, visit the festival's website or social media.
