Van Regenmortel Hans

Hans Van Regenmortel is an artistic coordinator at Musica, Impulse Centre for Music in Neerpelt (BE). He designs formats that foster musical development and  participation for all ages and in diverse contexts. Before that, and for more than 25 years he has been a teacher of violin and creative musicking at several Flemish music academies. He has been involved in a wide range of educational projects in formal and non-formal contexts and contributed to several publications on music and art education.
Hans studied the violin at the conservatories of Antwerp (BE) and Maastricht (NL). Some rather negative experiences in his own musical development already in an early stage had led towards a positively oriented quest for a more integrative approach in music education.
As a teacher and performer he soon became aware of the inconsistencies of mainstream music education, which often result in confusing ideas about music ability, learning, memory, notation, artistry and talent. The literature in the field of the early years and the cooperation with specialist colleagues at Musica, Impulse Centre for Music, resulted in taking the idiosyncrasies of the baby-caregiver dyad as a prototype for musical interaction.
In the process of zooming out on these issues he became incurably fascinated by musicality as a human phenomenon, as well as the possible impact of music (making) on the personal, interpersonal and group level. Hans has been translating and examining the relevance of these stance into formal and non-formal educational and artistic contexts. By doing so, he became aware of the strong relationship between music’s bonding capacities and the development of musical expertise in general. It became clear that the phenomenon we call music, in all its conformations, has a profound integrative capacity, but not necessarily under all circumstances.
His focus on creativity as a tool for developing integrated musical skills resulted in Klanksporen. Breinvriendelijk musiceren (2010, Strobbe & Van Regenmortel; in Dutch only, could be translated as Tracking Sounds. Brainfriendly Musicking ). As a result of his work in the field of music education, Hans was asked to organise the next EuNET Meryc (Music Education Researchers of Young Children) Conference 2019 Counterpoints of the senses: bodily experiences in learning music in cooperation with the IPEM Institute of Ghent University.