With his project Isabel Voets and Matthijs de Ridder aim to compile the soundtrack to the artistic universe that the Antwerp writer.
Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928) evoked in his work. In order to achieve this, they will make a cross-section of the Antwerp music scene between 1910 and 1930, with its diversity of musical genres, composers and performance practices. Besides the still popular opera and operetta culture, numerous new musical styles gained a foothold in those years: tango, charleston, foxtrot, jazz. Film and entertainment music also flourish in Antwerp, and the offshoots of the romantic music tradition clash with the modernist avant-garde.
The worldview that Paul van Ostaijen constructed (in his art theory and criticism) and brought to life (in poetry, prose and theatre) is very rich and profound. The breakthrough of modernism in Flanders, both in literature and art, as well as in a more general sense, would have been almost unthinkable without this body of work. Both the literary and theoretical parts of this oeuvre have frequently been the subject of research. Yet, although music is a prominent focus in Van Ostaijen’s work, music as such has rarely been a point of interest in research to date.
Following Van Ostaijen’s assertion that modern art was a collective and multidisciplinary endeavor, in their research Matthijs de Ridder and Isabel Voets break down the boundaries between different art disciplines. They provide an overview of the artistic network of writers, painters, and musicians of the 1920s and their artistic and critical interactions. Zooming in on the activities of the group of modernist composers, they compile an inventory of their critical and artistic publications, as well as a list of musical events. In addition they put together a collection of digitised partitions of modernist compositions, insofar as these have been preserved in books, magazines, libraries and archives in Belgium and abroad. The largely untold story of the musical avant-garde in Flanders will be unveiled in two articles and a concert lecture. In a second phase, De Ridder and Voets will turn their attention to the question how this music can be used for the adaptation of the theater text ‘De top der sentimentele bevestiging’ (The Summit of Sentimental Affirmation) for contemporary music theater.
