The Brussels platform for international musical modernism and the ISCM in the interwar period.

In the end of 1920s and the 1930s Brussels became an important centre of international musical modernism. For example, the first world performances of Strawinsky’s Psalm Symphony (1930), Prokofiev’s Le joueur (1929) and Alban Bergs Wozzeck in a French translation (1932) serve as testimonies of the city’s high status comparable to other major European centres of modernistic music. Cultural entrepreneurs like Henry Le Boeuf (director of the Concerts Populaires and the Philharmonic Society of Brussels), Paul Collaer (director of the Pro Arte concerts (1922–1934) and of the Belgian Broadcasting Institute) the Pro Arte quartet and Corneil de Thoran (director of the Royal Opera La Monnaie) created a unique platform for French, German and Russian modernism. The Pro Arte concerts series aimed to ‘offer the Belgian public an overview of the latest developments in European music’.

This cultural elite was strongly connected to the ISCM from its first festival in Salzburg in 1923 where the Pro Arte Quartet was invited. Le Boeuf, Collaer, Onnou and Corneil de Thoran attended all the festivals of ISCM. The Belgian section of the ISCM was founded in July 1926 and in 1930 the 8th festival was organized in Liège.
In this paper I will focus on the history of the Belgian section of the ISCM in the interwar period. However I will compare the ISCM festivals with the programmation of the Brussels concert societies in order to decribe its impact.
This research on modernistic music in Brussels between 1919 and 1940, is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of historical data sources collected and centralized in a relational database in access.