Jean-Baptiste Roucourt
Jean-Baptiste Roucourt (Brussels, 28 October 1780 - Brussels, 1 May 1849) was a music pedagogue, singer and composer. He founded the music school which was the cradle of the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels. Early life (1780-1812) Jean-Baptiste Roucourt was born in Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands. His father François Roucourt was from Diest and his mother Catherine Barbe Bormans from Gingelom in the Bishopric of Liège, but they lived in Brussels, near the Treurenberg, by the time of Jean-Baptiste's birth. The household counted at least two older children, Catherine Henriette and Louis. Jean-Baptiste was baptized at the Saint Michael and Gudula church on the day of his birth. In his early childhood, he had music education from Adrien-Joseph Van Helmont, who had succeeded his father Charles-Joseph as music master at Saint Michael and Gudula in 1777. However, Van Helmont junior being also employed as a singer at the royal chapel since the same year, and Van Helmont senior having declared in his resignation letter that he would keep the pay and the duties as a music master as long as his health allowed him to (this was a normal way to ensure one's retirement allowance at the time), it is likely that young Jean-Baptiste received lessons from Charles-Joseph Van Helmont as well, until the respected master passed away in 1790. The occupation of the Netherlands by Napoleon caused church music formations to be shut down from 1792 onward, so that music training, if any at all, existed only as individual private initiatives. Jean-Baptiste's teenage years were marked by revolutionary wars in 1794 between the French occupant and the Austrian emperor, and revolutionary campaigns in 1794 and 1796 where art works from shut churches and monasteries were sent to Paris or destroyed, so as to centralize the art sector, for visual arts at the Couvent des Petits-Augustins as of 1790, and for music at the Conservatoire of Paris from 1795 on. Jean-Baptiste entered the Conservatoire in February 1802. There, he learned singing with Vincenzo Fiocchi and Charles-Henri Plantade, and some sources also make him a pupil of the legendary Pierre-Jean Garat. After losing his father in 1805 and his mother in 1808, Jean-Baptiste made a living teaching and composing. His song album Six romances, dedicated to Ms. de Néverlée, was published in 1808 by Pleyel in Paris, which suggests he stayed there for a while after graduating. Roucourt's music school (1812-1830) Roucourts most important achievement was the music school he opened in October 1813 with funding from the city of Brussels. Music education having been disrupted considerably under the French Revolution, many initiatives were taken in the early 19th century to build it up anew. New pedagogical methods of Lancaster (1798), Choron (1816) and Galin (1818) were introduced and developed in the empire and under the Restoration, and from 1806 on the Conservatoire of Paris was extended with succursales, free singing and acting schools for talented young people who did not have the means for private tuition. In the Low Countries,