A to M festival is going to take place from Thursday, May 24th to Saturday May 26th at The Parlor in downtown Baton Rouge. This festival was planned as a way to reach out to a variety of audiences with different types of art and music, and to give opportunities to artists and musicians to expose themselves in a creative environment. LeMieux Studios has been working on finding ways to interact actively with audiences through the collaboration of music and art 

During the opening night, we will feature George Ufford, an artist specializing in mobile art, and a string quartet composed by Yiseul LeMieux that was inspired by his mobile art will also be performed. While the opening night show is going on, we will have live painting by local artist Louis DeAngelo. Other local artists’ works will be displayed, and various types of music including new music will also be performed as part of the opening night event. 

On Friday at 4:00 a few art songs by modern American composers will be sung and the lyrics will be recited. The recitation of poems by local writers will also take place. During the performance audience members will learn calligraphy by writing a few words from the art song lyrics and poems. The calligraphy work will be inspired by the lyrics of the art songs and poems and also the moods and colors of the music. Friday night at 7:30 Soprano, Mckenzie Millier will have a new music program that includes several pianists in town. Following the program, we are going to showcase local musician and artist Jeffery Livingston in his first solo show where he he will improvise electronic music using an array of effects pedals. We will also host an Open Mic. Night that will begin after Jeffery’s performance utilizing the many pianists and musicians that will be present at the festival. Bring your music and come and sing or show off anything that you are ready to present. 

Saturday at 11 a.m. there will be a youth music and art event that will include young artists and musicians from around Baton Rouge. Each piece of music will be paired with a work of art. This will give them not only a chance to work together with different artistic disciplines and other children in the community, but also will allow them to have an experience of inspiring each other’s art. At 3:30 a guitar duo, Eric Liffmann and Masson LeMieux, are going to perform classical music on electric guitars. The combination of classical music and electronic instruments will inspire live, mixed media artwork by Jeffery Livingston. At 6:00 a program featuring drummer Luke Hester and his solo work ‘Nocturne Frequencies’ will take place. The closing night program starting at 7:00 will include several pieces of music for different instruments written by Yiseul LeMieux along with a set of voice pieces by composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856) that will be performed by Rhaea D’Aliesio and collaborated with artwork by a young artist. 

We will have many musicians and artists participating in a collaborative event that hopes to help people connect to different types of arts in new ways, and to hopefully gain a deeper appreciation of unfamiliar art forms. This event aspires to be gratifying to the audience and musicians and artists that take part in the event.