Flemish Masters

“Flemish Masters”—over a year ago, when we planned this season, it sounded like such a neat idea for a concert theme. After all, those of us who love singing and love early music thought immediately about Josquin des Prez and Orlando di Lasso—or, Orlande de Lassus—di Lasso is the Italian version of this Fleming’s name.

We don’t like to cover the same territory, and since Sanford’s program notes tell you about the composers and the music on tonight’s program, most of my lecture will be a mini history lesson.

Flemish Masters. Flanders. What does the average Joe Schmoe know about Flanders? He may recall that poppies grow in the fields there—especially if he remembers or knows about WWI. If he watched the Winter Olympics he saw a lot of figure skating and Peggy Fleming—I wonder where her ancestors came from. And there’s Ned Flanders of the Simpsons—Hi diddly ho, neighbors!

As I started to plan this lecture I realized that, outside of a vague familiarity with the name, in fact I knew very little about Flanders. First of all, where exactly is it? Ah—the first problem is in the word “exactly.”

In my modern Rand McNally atlas, “Flanders” is marked in Northern France, along the Belgian border. “Plaine des Flandres” is printed in France, below the North Sea, between Calais and Dunkirk. But the boundaries of the independent duchy of Flanders fluctuated, which was “normal” in those centuries of shifting empires. Medieval Flanders included parts of what is now northern France, Belgium, and a tiny bit of the Netherlands, running along the North Sea and inland as far as Cambrai or Liege, more than 50 miles inland from the coastline.

Flanders was one of the richest counties in the medieval world. Emerging from the dark ages into the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, industry and trade grew and flourished in Flanders. The town of Bruges was a great hub. A 12-mile canal joined Bruges to the North Sea and a hundred small ships traveled inland daily, connecting merchandise from numerous ports in three continents (Mediterranean Europe, Africa, and Asia) with the products and merchants of France, the Lowlands, and the Rhine Valley.

Bruges imported wool from England and developed a vital textile industry. (It was so hugely successful that King Edward III lured Flemish weavers to England and established a textile industry there.) Crafts guilds, like the Florentine “arte di lana,” became powerful and displaced the nobility. Like the Medicis, the Crespin family established an extensive banking enterprise that included money lending and the issuance of insurance.

A communal revolution freed the Flemish cities from feudal rule. Municipal and economic life were dominated by the bourgeoisie. Population in Flanders grew to the highest in Europe north of the Alps. Before 1100 few cities had a population of 3,000. Just before the Black Death plague of 1349, population in the cities had grown to 50,000.

The economy changed. To keep peasants on the land, barons sold freedom to their serfs and leased the land back for money. Money became desirable and necessary—to purchase all the wonderful new exotic goods. Feudal manors were broken up into smaller estates. Widening markets brought workers in contact with improved farming methods and new tools.

New industries created demand for individual crops such as sugar cane, herbs (cumin and aniseed), hemp, flax, vegetable oils, dyes. Populous towns promoted cattle raising, dairy farming, market gardening, vineyards, commercial fishing. Agricultural techniques improved as farmers learned from other lands far away new tricks of farming, breeding, drainage, irrigation, soil preservation. In Flanders, 13th century farmers practiced 3-year crop rotation, turning marshes and moors into rich farmland.

By the 14th century, in all of Europe north of the Alps, only Flanders rivaled Italy in economic development. Flanders throbbed with industry, commerce—and class war. It was this class warfare that caused Flanders to lose its independence and autonomy. Merchants, wary of competition from England (which was jealous of Flanders’s wool trade), sought support from France. The nobility, in turn, looked to England and Germany. A bloody proletariat revolution was crushed by France’s King Philip IV and Flanders became a dependency of France in 1328.

Ten years later the Hundred Years’ War began when England’s King Edward III claimed the French Crown. Flanders, with its great wool market, weighed heavily in this conflict and served as the stage for what became classical and familiar historical drama—Shakespeare’s Henry V in Agincourt (Kenneth Branaugh’s St. Crispin’s Day speech is very good, but I still prefer Lawrence Olivier’s) and Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan in Rouen, which is performed by high school as well as professional drama groups.

After the war, Flanders moved under the duchy of Burgundy and was allied with England. This is the period when boundaries and identities became somewhat elastic. By the mid-1400s “Burgundian” society—described as being centered around Bruges, Ghent, Liege (formerly known as Flemish cities)—had become the most polished of in all of Europe.

Flanders set the pace in painting in the fifteenth century, with the works of geniuses Jan van Eyke and Rogier van der Weyden. So too, in an atmosphere of prosperity, art-loving nobles and burghers supported music through one of its most exuberant periods. Quoting Will Durant: “Here, in Flemish polyphony, Western Europe lived in the last phase of the Gothic spirit in art—religious devotion tempered with secular gaiety, forms firm in base and structure, fragile and delicate in development and ornament. Even Italy, so hostile to Gothic, joined Western Europe in acknowledging the supremacy of Flemish music, and in seeking maestri from Flanders for episcopal choirs and princely courts. Emperor Maximilian I, enchanted by the music of Brussels, formed a choir in Vienna on Flemish models. Charles V took Flemish musicians to Spain; Archduke Ferdinand took some to Austria; Christian II others to Denmark; ‘the fountain of music,’ said the Venetian Cavallo, is in the Netherlands.”

Here we find that the term “Flemish” was used generally to include the Netherlands, a geographical area that was technically never part of Flanders. It is confusing, because it was complex. In the mid-1500s “the Netherlands” included Belgium; together with some French provinces (including Flanders), AND the duchy of Luxembourg, all were under Hapsburg rule. Mapmaking must have been a lucrative profession in those days! To Cavallo, an Italian on the other side of Alps, Flanders ... the Netherlands—close enough.

(It’s sort of like trying to define the San Francisco Bay Area. Is it just the nine counties that touch the bay? Some people would argue that the Bay Area should include Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and even Yolo counties. And to many viewers far far away, California is seen as either San Francisco or Los Angeles!)

What constitutes present-day Holland was actually north of Flanders. In the middle ages it was part of the Frankish kingdom, part of the buffer state of Lorrain. In the 10th century it was divided into feudal fiefs to better resist Norse invasions. The Germans who cleared and settled the heavily wooded area north of the Rhine called it Holtland—woodland. Cities there were not as prosperous as their Flemish neighbors, but they were soundly based on steady industry and orderly trade. This region did not reach its flowering until the 17th century, when the Dutch empire stretched as far as the East Indies and even to the New World—remember Henry Hudson and the colonies in the Atlantic states ... New York was first known as New Amsterdam.

If we insist on geographical correctness, only two of the composers we perform tonight are actually Flemish, both from the Hainaut region. Josquin des Prez was born in Prez just south of the Belgian border and Orlande de Lassus in Mons, just north of the border. The other three are Dutch: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was born in Amsterdam, Ton de Leeuw in Rotterdam, and Henk Badings actually born in Java (which was still a Dutch colony in 1906, when he was born).

Some say that nationality is distinguished by common language. Well, on tonight’s program we are singing works in Latin and in French. The two Latin pieces are by our earliest composers, Josquin and Lassus. These two, who were actually Flemish, did what a lot of Flemish composers of that period did. They left their homes for work in other countries.

During his life, Josquin (1440–1521) worked predominantly in Italy—directing the ducal chapels of Milan and Ferrara, as well as being a member of the Papal Chapel. He was also in the service of Louis XII in Paris, and spent his final days back in CondŽ sur l’Escaut, close to his Flemish birthplace.

Lassus (1532–94) was taken to Italy at an early age and served in Mantua, Naples and finally Rome before returning to Antwerp. He directed the chapel of the Duke of Bavaria from 1560 until his death in 1594. Given their origins, the native tongue of Josquin and Lassus was probably French. Given their life experience, they composed works in Latin, Italian, and French. In addition, Lassus composed in German. Because of their many compositions in different languages, there are several different spellings of their names.

Our other three composers were Dutch, not Flemish. Dutch was their native language, but their compositions which we perform tonight are in French.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) was born in Amsterdam. Except for his studies with Zarlino in Venice (which some historians refute for lack of evidence), he was a lifelong resident of his home town, leaving only to inspect new organs and advise on their repairs. As it says in the program notes, Sweelinck did not compose in his native tongue, choosing instead texts in French, the preferred language of the well-to-do. (This was a golden age when Flanders and Holland were producing Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt and Hals.) His most famous compositions were for keyboard, and as a much-sought-after teacher his influence spread into Germany through his eminent pupils such as Scheidt and Scheidermann (who taught Reincken, who taught J.S. Bach).

So we skip now to the 20th century, with works by Henk Badings and Ton de Leeuw. Both composers undoubtedly wrote in their native tongue, Dutch, and probably other languages as well. Like our earlier Flemish composers, these 20th century musicians enjoyed international careers. Like Sweelinck, they wrote the pieces on tonight’s program in French—but probably for reasons other than entertaining well-to-do amateurs.

Henk Badings (1907–1987) began composing while he was working at the University of Technology in Delft, where he received his degree in mining technology. He worked at the Rotterdam Conservatory, was director of The Hague and became a member of honor of the Flanders Academy of Sciences. He was an explorer and innovator. In 1956 he founded the electronic music studio of Philips in Eindhoven and wrote many electronic compositions. He taught a diverse range of courses—composition, theory, orchestration, acoustics, computing science—and was also active with painting, sculpting, and writing poetry. He also taught in Stuttgart and guest conducted in Australia, and the US. An early work (written in 1946 and definitely displaying Badings’s affinity for French impressionism), the Trois chansons is a setting of lyrics by Breton poet Theodore Botrel.

Finally we come to Ton de Leeuw (1926–1996), who was a student of Henk Badings. He went to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen. His interest in non-European music led him to study ethnomusicology with Jaap Kunst in Amsterdam, where he also taught composition, later serving as director of the Sweelinck Conservatory. He was also musical director for the Netherlands Radio Union and gave several hundred radio lectures about contemporary and non-Western music. He gave workshops all over Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US (including at UC Berkeley and Mills College). He died in Paris. The Priere which we perform tonight is an interesting blend of cultures. It was written in 1954, not long after his Parisian stint with Messiaen and his ethnomusicology studies. The text is originally Islamic, but it is set in French.

I hope that this lecture has done more than given you some interesting factoids. Besides the bit of “enlightenment” regarding Flanders, I want you to notice connections—that events or conditions or even significant personages or personalities are not isolated occurrences. Cultures evolve and relate to each other. Music, which is product of those cultures, is also shaped by these evolutions and relationships.

So, okely dokely—thank you for being here.

March 2002
Audrey Wong