Billiet Jeroen. Gevaert's School of Arts. The paradigm of the picturesque-instructional museum and the Brussels conservatory horn studio during the late romantic period.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Royal Conservatory of Brussels developed into a laboratory of ideas on music education and performance. This new model of education, largely developed by François-Auguste Gevaert (1828-1908), was backed by the development of an instrument museum, a research library, and a Société des Concerts dedicated to the performance of music by old masters.
Gevaert’s visionary approach of the conservatory as part of a public space designed into an "instructional picturesque museum" coincides with a previously unseen heyday of Belgian musical life in the late Romantic period.
But how did Gevaert's high-end School of Arts translate to the ‘core business’ of the institution: the training of young orchestral musicians-in-training? In the Brussels horn class of Louis- Henri Merck (1824-1900), this period is characterised by radical changes in repertoire choice, instrument use, repertoire and specific teaching methods playing style. This “Brussels” approach led to the emergence of a large diaspora of Brussels-trained musicians in domestic and foreign orchestral formations and educational institutions in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The present project approaches incentives, social-cultural context, educational repertoire, style evolution, teaching methodology and dissemination of the above from the point of view of students from the horn classes during the 'long' romantic period, with a focus on the period of Gevaert's directorship.
OsiRiS, Orchestral Instrument Research in Synthesis
OsiRiS welcomes research projects that focus on the study of Western orchestral instruments and their performance practices, from the nineteenth century to the present. The topics covered by this research group serve artistic performance practice and/or its educational implementations related to one or more orchestral instruments, or to the orchestral ensemble as an instrument.
By definition, the research group is multidisciplinary and connects with at least two of the following research areas:
• Performance practice within a historical, contemporary, or collaborative perspective
• Reflection on instrumental technique and its development in function of a constantly evolving performance practice
• Social-historical study of orchestral musicians as artistic personalities, and of orchestral life
• Performance practice on orchestral instruments in solo, chamber, orchestral, and ensemble contexts
• Organology of instruments after 1800 and instrument making
• Repertoire study
• Composition
• [...]
Researchers can join OsiRiS from both a theoretical-framework and artistic-performative profile. In this regard, cross-fertilization between OsiRiS projects and research taking place within other KCB research groups is strongly encouraged.