Thursday, June 27, 2013
D1.18B (Oudemanhuispoort)
“Without a doubt, the term Belgium, which dates from the Roman era, has had in the past […] a meaning that is more or less elastic, relating to the instability of political events.” By establishing Belgium as a flexible historical entity that stretches beyond the brief history of the modern nation, the Belgian musicologist Charles Van den Borren is able to include the most significant Franco-Flemish composers of the Renaissance in his 1930 article, “Du rôle international de la Belgique dans l’histoire musical.” By virtue of their birth and early education, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez, among others, belong to “Belgium,” even though they lived most of their lives abroad. Van den Borren points to the Renaissance as the height of Belgian international influence in music. Van den Borren’s overtly nationalist rhetoric offered an alternative to the dominant musical-critical language of the interwar years, which focused on debates about stylistic differences between new Flemish and Walloon music and anxiety about the dominance of contemporary foreign works in Belgium. He offered a unifying perspective by turning to masterpieces of the distant past that performers and audiences had largely forgotten. By presenting the works of Franco-Flemish masters of the Renaissance as Belgian, he constructed a narrative that incorporated the landmarks of the past into the canon of a national musical culture. This historiographical sleight of hand contributed to Belgium’s nostalgia for its distant past, which was integral to the larger cultural project to assert a simultaneously national and cosmopolitan identity.
