The Museum of Historically Informed Musicking by Danielle Older

We, the founders of this institution, are a group of five research masters students at Maastricht University who for the past two months have each undertaken a research project. While each project is quite distinct in character, they are thematically bound by an examination into musical cultures. Our starting point was exploring how different musical actors translate aspects of complex historical cultures in order to create new cultures of performance and listening for the twenty-first century. We each sought, within the parameters of our own personal interests, to explore what musical practices consist in; how they are contingent upon social and historical contexts; what assumptions may underlie contemporary attempts to reconstruct musical cultures from the past; how these assumptions may manifest themselves materially. What you see beyond these doors is the culmination of these efforts; a unified exposition of our individual projects. The name of our museum is an amalgamation of the practice of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) and Christopher Small’s concept of “Musicking” (1988). In Small’s view, music is not to be conceived as a static object, but rather as a dynamic process. Small substitutes the noun ‘music’ with a verb ‘to music’ to indicate that music cannot be simply located in any score, instrument or text, but can be thought of as any human activity relating to music performance that takes place in temporal and spatial dimensions. We do not intend to present this collection of “old ideas” as definitive or closed, but as a discursive insight into a “novel”, if not strictly new, self-reflexive manner of observing and practising the presentation of research on the matter. The aim of the collection is not to conclude, but to stimulate and develop discussion into the future, from the past. The Museum of Historically Informed Musicking therefore proudly presents an interconnected collection of artefacts, activities, relationships and locations involved in historically informed musicking; a fusion of the past and present.

Fashion (Dag van de Romantische Muziek)

The majority of the DRM’s visitors is female, as the possibility to dress up in a romantic dress appeals to many young women: "Women like to dress up and the festival provides a great opportunity to wear a special dress, for instance a wedding dress. When you would walk down the Lijnbaan in a dress like that, people will probably laugh. At the DRM the opposite is true, as guests appreciate these costumes and often take pictures of other visitors" (H. Mosselman, interview, May 16, 2014). Dressing up for this day is stimulated by the organisation as these romantic outfits make-up part of the decor of the festival. Mosselman adds that the organisation is even considering to establish a special zone in Het Park were people can change into their festival outfit, so they do not have to ride the public transport in their fancy dresses. Media accounts of the DRM strongly highlight the festival's social component by featuring stories of friends dressing up together and making visits to the DRM an annual tradition and guests taking pictures of exquisitely dressed festival goers.

Return to Artefacts and Instruments

Fashion as part of the musicking process at the DRM

Fashion in La Nueva Canción

For Nueva Canción artists their style and manner of dressing themselves was integral to the image and indentity they wished to portray to their audience. The Barbudo or "bearded" style was particularly popular, with many of the integrants of the bands being young men, the beard or other facial hair came to signify both a masculine virility associated with such leftist figures as Che Guevara and unconformity with the clean shaven majority. (ref) Ponchos, often in black or red, were a standard "uniform" and indeed they still remain part of the performance given today by the bands (as you can see below). Women often sported campesina or "country woman" style clothing, home-made variants of the kind worn by icons of the movement such as Violeta Parra and Mercedes Soza of Argentina.

Both the ponchos and the campesina style clothing represented links to a part of Chilean culture lodged firmly in tradition and through extension, the past.

It was through the use of this clothing that the artists further established/re-established links with what they viewed as their common history.

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