Brussels calling: Heritage, the Romantic-Modernist Conservatoire and the Modern-Day Performer

Name: Brussels calling: Heritage, the Romantic-Modernist Conservatoire and the Modern-Day Performer
Start: 2025-11-18T09:30:00+01:00
End: 2025-11-18T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Musical Instrument Museum

Schedule

Tue Nov 18 2025 at 09:30 am to 04:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Musical Instrument Museum | Brussels, BU

More information on https://www.kcb.be/en/pps2025
9:30-9:45
Introduction
By Jeroen Billiet (KCB) and Kristin Van den Buys (KCB, VUB)
9:45-10:45
Keynote/workshop Thinking about Listening: Music and Sound in Historical Practice
By Sasha Rasmussen (University of Nottingham)
The experience of listening has proven elusive for historians and musicologists alike, both for its ephemerality and its emotional complexity. In this talk, Sasha Rasmussen will reflect on why many historians have been so reticent to incorporate sound as evidence in their research, and what can be gained through greater attention to the aural environment. As the notion of "embodied history" gains traction in academic circles, music and sound emerge as essential elements of the sensory landscape, and therefore pivotal to how people in the past experienced the world around them. Taking formal music education as a theoretical springboard, this presentation explores the relationship between musical performance and the perception of sound. In these institutional contexts, historical actors more readily and explicitly articulated their listening habits, as they deliberately worked to train their aural abilities. However, the modes of listening they employed were also contingent on a host of social and material factors beyond the musical score. Rasmussen argues that by approaching the subject of listening through the bifocal lens of musicology and cultural history, we gain a deeper understanding of how sound was made meaningful, on the level of individual experience and within the broader societal framework.
11:00-12:00
Lectures Brussels Calling (1): Aspects of Musical Life
By Benjamin Glorieux (KCB), Nuno Cernadas (KCB), Eleonora Perretta (KCB) and Richard Sutcliffe (MIM)
Chair: Jeroen Billiet (KCB)

12:30-13:15
Eclectic Lunchtime Concert
By all presenting researchers

13:30-14:30
Lectures Brussels calling (2): the case of brassiness
By Jens Demey, Paul Voet and Jeroen Billiet (KCB researchers)
Chair: Nuno Cernadas (KCB)
14:45-16:00
Group discussion; wrap up and conclusions
Chair: Sasha Rasmussen (University of Notthingham)