Op 9 november 2024 wordt vanaf 11.00 uur het KVNM Najaarssymposium gehouden met als thema 'Music, migration and war'.

Er zijn in totaal zes presentaties over uiteenlopende onderwerpen, van een Italiaanse violist in Nederland in het Interbellum tot de relatie tussen Oekraïense en Nederlandse muziek.  In de afsluitende keynote speech introduceert  Esther Marie Pauw een documentaire over de Geneefse psalmen in Zuid-Afrika, gevolgd door een panelgesprek onder leiding van Esther Marie Pauw. 

Het symposium vindt plaats op zaterdag 9 november 2024 

Plaats: PARNASSOS CULTUURCENTRUM, Kruisstraat 201, Utrecht  

Tijd: 11.00 uur tot 16.30 uur.

Aanmelden voor dit symposium kan via deze link: https://forms.gle/nYGnYW6uy7iPbTnD8

Een overzicht van de presentaties:

Symposium ‘MUSIC, MIGRATION AND WAR’ – 9 NOVEMBER 2024

Program

10.30h Coffee and welcome

Een overzicht van de presentaties:

11.00h Philomeen Lelieveldt: Marcello Lanfredi and his ‘’Italian’’ orchestra

11.30h Désirée Staverman: ‘Pendant la guerre’, the impact of Belgian musicians in the Netherlands during World War I

12.00h Primavera Driessen Gruber: ‘Perhaps Some Day Someone Will Give Them the Particular Attention They Deserve’ (Jacob Presser, in: Ashes in the Wind)

12.30h LUNCH BREAK

13.30h Marlies de Roos: Staging Musical Identities. Intercultural Exchange and Musical Identity in the ‘Lautari Space’ at De Nacht van de Balkan Concert (1980)

14.00h Iryna Fedun: Ukrainian Folk Music in the Context of War and Migration

14.30h Tea break

15.00h Esther Marie Pauw:  Six Genevan psalms and their sonic multi-vocalities in a contemporary South African music curation

Keynote speech, film screening and podium talk makers

ABSTRACTS

Philomeen Lelieveldt: Marcello Lanfredi and his ‘’Italian’’ orchestra

 In this talk I will address Marcello Lanfredi’s appeal to Dutch audiences (especially women) against the background of the musical entertainment and political climate in the Netherlands during the interbellum years. The 5th of May 1916, violist and Stehgeiger Marcello Lanfredi, born in Mantova in 1886, settled in Amsterdam for a summer contract with the party venue Bellevue. April 1916, in the same city, he started Café Concert Eden with Mantovan companion Ariodante Valli, where he conducted the Lanfredi orchestra of 10 to 14 musicians, half Italian, Half Dutch, in daily performances of a wide catalogue of salon repertoire. After selling their business, in 1919, Lanfredi continued working as Stehgeiger of his orchestra in Pschorr in Rotterdam and in Zandvoort, a popular seaside village and in Hecks’ Lunchrooms. He performed in two Dutch movies, while also managing his orchestra through an extensive travelling program between Italy and the Netherlands. This talk will show how his talent for networking with relevant actors in the entertainment industry, amongst whom Dirk Reese, helped him to integrate in Dutch society. But also how government legislation that became stricter in the 1930s started to hinder his activities. The talk will be documented with different types of sources, such as commissions in compositions of Dutch composers, the Foreigner registration files, newspaper clippings, references in Dutch literature, an original sound recording from his orchestra from 1937 from hotel Atlanta in Rotterdam as well as a film fragment from a 1922 movie.

Désirée Staverman: ‘Pendant la guerre’, the impact of Belgian musicians in the Netherlands during World War I

Among the many refugees who fled to the Netherlands during World War I were artists, writers and musicians. Of the musicians and composers who fled from Belgium, some stayed for a few years, others settled here permanently. They brought with them a cultural baggage with a predominantly French signature that they were keen to propagate. Initially, many of them were actively involved in charity concerts for Belgian and other war victims. What influence did these Belgian musicians have on musical life in the Netherlands? The presentation focuses on the singer Berthe Seroen and the cellist Marix Loevensohn who - both trained at the Brussels Conservatory - came to the Netherlands in 1914 and 1915 respectively. While Loevensohn was able to start immediately as solo cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Seroen had to start all over again. She soon realised that her experience as an opera singer in both Brussels and Antwerp would not help her much. However, together with pianist and conductor Evert Cornelis, Berthe Seroen developed a series of innovative chamber music concerts from 1916 onwards, in which Loevensohn also regularly participated. Thus, they not only introduced a large number of songs and chamber music by (contemporary) Belgian and French composers to the Netherlands, but also inspired young Dutch composers to write works for them.

Primavera Driessen Gruber: ‘Perhaps Some Day Someone Will Give Them the Particular Attention They Deserve’ (Jacob Presser, in: Ashes in the Wind)

Of the 300 music professionals with an Austrian background, who had come to the Netherlands after the Great War, hoping to find a permanent refuge from the growing anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany, Austria or the former parts of the Habsburg Empire, about a hundred musicians found themselves trapped in the Netherlands after the German invasion in May 1940. This very heterogeneous group in terms of musical training, professional experience and status, religious observance, political affiliation, nationality, generation and gender allows us to distinguish different forms of migration - voluntary migration for professional or family reasons vs. forced migration, exile and hybrid forms – and to discuss their various networks and different degrees of acculturation in Dutch musical cultures. Based on research for an ‚Austrian Biographical Dictionary of Music Professionals, Persecuted during National Socialism’, to be published in the following years, the presentation will focus on the musical cultures of the entertainment and radio world in the Netherlands, with particular attention to the participation of Austrian musical exiles in Dutch resistance networks. This will be followed by a discussion of the impact of these migratory movements to the Netherlands before and during World War II on post-war Dutch musical cultures and vice versa.

Marlies de Roos: Staging Musical Identities  
Intercultural Exchange and Musical Identity in the ‘Lautari Space’ at De Nacht van de Balkan Concert (1980). 

In the 1980s, Romania was marked by political turmoil, economic hardship, and the repressive control of the socialist regime, set against the backdrop of growing tensions and a near-war-like atmosphere. The Romanian state strategically utilised the talents of the lautari [Romanian Romani musicians] to construct a distinctive national musical identity for international audiences. As a result, the lautari faced both marginalisation as Roma and recognition as musicians. International tours offered them brief glimpses of freedom, prompting some to seek asylum and consider permanent migration. 

This paper examines the 1980 Dutch concert, De Nacht van de Balkan, which featured performances by lautari and Dutch musicians, highlighting Eastern European and ‘Gypsy’ musical traditions. The event serves as a case study to analyse how intercultural exchanges influence identity formation. While the concert sought to celebrate diversity, it simultaneously reinforced stereotypes through exoticised representations. This study thus offers insight into the unintended perpetuation of exoticism in Western contexts and the complexities of identity formation for the lautari. 

Utilising Margaret Beissinger’s concept of the ‘lautari space’, derived from Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘third space’, and the perspectives of Timothy Rice and David Hargreaves on the interplay between music and identity, this paper provides a fresh perspective on the resilience and adaptation of musical identities.

Iryna Fedun: Ukrainian Folk Music in the Context of War and Migration

The topic of music and war has recently gained increasing popularity, with numerous new studies emerging (Arnold, B. 1993, Cornelius, S.H. 2004, O’Connell, J.M. 2011, Kraaz, S. 2018, and others). In Ukraine, folklorists-philologists or musicologists occasionally address this topic, but ethnomusicological studies on it are almost non-existent. The reason for this is that folk music has been replaced by authorial creativity, and while the lyrics of folk songs change, new melodies are no longer being created. Therefore, we can only trace which musical genres of folk art are most used during wartime, how calendar and family celebrations are changing, and what impact the migration of Ukrainians to other European countries has on folklore. In particular, there are about 140,000 Ukrainian migrants in the Netherlands, making the topic of Ukrainian-Dutch musical relations particularly relevant today. It is interesting to analyse the commonalities between these countries not only in contemporary interactions but also based on historical connections. Celtic and Germanic tribes, later Vikings, played an important role in shaping not only the Netherlands but also Ukraine. A comparative analysis of folklore in both countries could reveal possible shared elements. Modern migrants enrich the diversity of the musical landscape with their own music and collaborate with the local music scene through joint projects. For migrants themselves, music becomes a means of preserving and expressing their identity, helping them feel part of a community. However, Ukrainian migrants also willingly accept those Dutch traditions that are  most in tune with their own ones. In the future, deeper research is crucial to understand whether new music integrates into everyday life, whether traces of war, migration and cultural blending are evident in new musical compositions, and to determine the popularity of music in the context of migration.

Esther Marie Pauw: Six Genevan psalms and their sonic multi-vocalities in a contemporary South African music curation

 'Nege fragmente uit ses Khoi'npsalms' (2018), a film by Aryan Kaganof made in South Africa and screened as a prize winner on a national documentary festival, elicited audience responses of bewilderment at 'what was going on here,' as articulated at the film premiere's question-and-answer session.
At the KVNM Autumn symposium, the film will be screened as part of a keynote reflection on the re-imagined afterlives of Genevan psalm melodies carrying Dutch texts into colonial South Africa. The presentation proposes that a narrative of 'migration of music' includes both war-motifs of violence, genocide and erasure, as well as sonic re-imaginations of contemporary voices. These aspects of music's migrations are perhaps key to locating 'what is going on' in the Khoi'npsalms film. Online publication reflections about the production and its film (De Waal 2018 [and] Blom, Erasmus & Pauw 2020a, 2020b, 2021) acknowledge improvisations of insecurities, risks, intimacies and cares, as also revealed through the close shots of faces and fingers that a camera lense captured in Stellenbosch. The KVNM Autumn symposium delves further to explore music as a force that causes harms of erasure, as well as opens sonic avenues to emerging multi-vocalities, centuries after initial contact. Symposium delegates are invited to watch the 21-minute film (or read more information here).