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.