A woman looks into the lens with pride and self-assurance. A tad provocative, a penetrating gaze. Who is she and where does she come from? With this lady on the billboards, Gent Festival of Flanders goes in search of its ROOTS.

FESTIVAL THEME 2016: ROOTS

Long ago, music was heard, learnt and remembered through singing. No music notation existed—and most people couldn’t read or write. Songs originated within a community, from the people themselves. Melodies travelled and developed on their journey, influenced, shaped and transformed by their encounters. Songs were also passed between different social classes: from the clergy and the aristocracy to rural communities, and vice versa. Later, this folk music had a special role in the search for national identity and patriotic pride.

Composers have keenly incorporated folk music in their own work over the centuries. Folk music can be seen as an almost inexhaustible source of melodies and dances; and a point of inspiration for a grand symphony or light chamber music.

However, it is much more than that.

Music drives evolution and revolution; it is the cause and consequence of upheaval; it is the thread that binds what was with what is and with what is still to come. It connects and rejects, it reflects and confronts. Music gets to the heart of the matter in a search for identity and permanence. It is a search for our roots!

To return to folk music is to return to our origins, our genesis. It is a quest for our very foundations, for those strands that touch us more deeply than anything else.

The lively Gent Festival is an especially good way to get in touch with our roots. Dive into the programme and discover the dazzling array of musical genes in our DNA. We dance the syrtaki, the polka and the czardas. We discover Mahler’s link with a simple children’s song, what a boy’s choir meant to Haydn and why we repeatedly return to Bach. Plus: we go singing in Africa, we explore in America and we celebrate in Ghent.

Do enjoy your Gent Festival!

 
VEERLE SIMOENS, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR GENT FESTIVAL OF FLANDERS