Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht

The Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht (FOMU) is the largest festival of its kind in the world. 

Museumkunst?

Museums are not as timeless as they seem. Although there is a long European tradition of collecting, researching, and displaying valuable objects, it was only during the Enlightenment that the idea of making such collections accessible to the general public took hold. Museums now strive actively to promote diversity, interactivity and glocal involvement. How does this history of the museum’s development relate to that of music? How has music been notated, preserved, passed on and shared (or kept secret) over the centuries? And can we consider the modern concert hall as the equivalent of a museum?

With the rise of museums came an immediate criticism of curators, as well as the criteria they used in forming such collections. Some dismissed the museum canon as conservative and lifeless, claiming that ‘progressive’ or ‘current’ art lived outside the museum. The term Museumkunst was therefore used mockingly to denote old-fashioned art that perhaps deserved to be preserved, but which was otherwise meaningless to contemporary society. We ask ourselves the same question about music: has the art music of past centuries become Museumkunst? Much past repertoire was functional music, which we have now disconnected from its original purpose: we move sacred music to the secular concert hall, while repertoire that originally served political or civil goals is now performed as background music. Have we thereby cut the lifeline of these pieces, or is the case altogether more complex?

By playing with these ideas, this festival edition seeks to curate new listening experiences and promote a rich variety of early music sounds. We investigate the effects of psychoacoustics and what space interacts with musical experience. We make sensory connections, multidisciplinary, which we not only bring together rationally, but also with ‘magical’ analogies in color, shape, and sound.

Clichés belong to the canon: these we welcome, but then with a twist. We will explore the art of collecting itself by examining the formation of musical collections in past centuries, from choir books and chansonniers, to keyboard compendia such as the Düben Collection and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, to the large Denkmäler editions of Bach and Handel from the 19th century. Moreover, attention to the political motives behind the collections is welcomed. We explore music collections formed by individual composers: J.S. Bach, for example, created his own musical monument by collecting pieces composed by family members. The musical equivalents of the Kunstkabinett (the cabinet of curiosities) such as musical games and rarities, will also find their place.