Gil blas - Jules Strens

In September 1925, on the occasion of the sixty-fifth birthday of their 'master', seven students of Paul Gilson gathered to form the first composers' collective in Belgian national music history. The members of Les Synthtistes (the Synthetists) are Ren Bernier, Francis de Bourguignon, Gaston Brenta, Tho Dejoncker, Marcel Poot, Maurice Schoemaker and Jules Strens. Their intent is twofold and both theoretical and practical. Les Synthtistes want to distinguish themselves as the 'Brussels seven' by breaking away from the prevailing late-romantic music of their time. Their theoretical aim is to synthesize the modern tendencies in music from 1925 onwards, to connect with the 'acquisitions of contemporary music' and to apply them within balanced and well-defined forms. Their practical goal is to make it easier to find a stage to perform their new symphonic music by uniting. In a period when there is no professional symphonic orchestra in Belgium, apart from the opera orchestra, they compose and transcribe their original symphonic works for wind band. They work together with Arthur Prevost and the Royal Band of the Belgian Guides which grew into a model instrumentation of 85 musicians during the interwar period. Thanks to Prevost and the Guides a unique collection of original, modern music for wind band by Les Synthtistes can be heard on the Brussels concert stages during the interwar period. Because only a few works of this unique, forgotten collection of 75 works were published, this unique canon remained largely unknown. Thanks to a historical study of sources by Luc Vertommen, these works for wind band are now, a century after their creation, made accessible and recorded for the first time.