Le concert maçon

A musical approach to Freemasonry in the 18th century: songs for the rites and fraternal assemblies, a magic lantern, and a musicological project by Jean-Luc Impe. Performed by the ensemble Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy, under the direction of Jean-Luc Impe, with the tenor Stefan Van Dijck.

This show, or rather the idea of this show, was born of chance and of shared passions revealed over the course of various encounters between the musicians of Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy and the entire administrative, heritage and scholarly leadership of the Museum of Freemasonry in Brussels. Chance, first of all, for we, Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy, had the fortuitous opportunity to acquire a set of antique masonic slides made for the magic lantern, ancestor of the slide projector, and even a distant ancestor of cinema, if one considers the extraordinary animation of certain surviving slides. It should be noted, for a proper understanding of the significance of this acquisition, that the use of the magic lantern as a teaching instrument, notably for the ritual and symbolic education of masons, was very widespread in Europe as in the United States, and this from the Age of Enlightenment onwards. Passion, next, for our ensemble has always striven to bring back to life the vaudevilles, those old, popular airs which, in the course of their existence, come to carry upon their own melody texts of a completely different, even opposite, nature. Thus, if an air, a melody, appears at a given moment of the 18th century bearing a religious text, for example, it may very well, some time later, be grafted with a new text, an erotic one, this time, and then serve as a vehicle for masonic edification. The masonic songbooks all work in this way, largely reusing pre-existing musical material. The interest of such a process lies in setting the original text underlying the borrowed air against the new linguistic content… and thus in comparing the hypotexts and paratexts that so distinctively colour the reception and understanding of the new masonic texts which have appropriated the musical body of these pre-existing airs. It is this work, this immense undertaking of computer-encoding the 18th-century masonic songbooks and setting them against the reference texts of the time, that we are carrying out together with the Museum and the Cedom.

The show itself answers a twofold vocation: to give both to see and to hear. To hear these magnificent airs of the 18th century, or to listen to the music of lesser-known mason composers. To see those marvellous paintings on glass that are the magic-lantern slides, which illuminate the particular iconosphere of an Age of Enlightenment, intimate at more than one moment. To hear and to see, to play upon the senses, the better to grasp a reality so often fantasised by those inhabited solely by the idea of a secret plot… to see and to hear, the better to shed light on a society that speaks of our present-day values, that gives fresh meaning to the words fraternity, liberty and equality.