During the Forbidden Music Regained festival, which took place for the fifth time on Saturday 29 November at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the board of the Royal Society for Music History of the Netherlands announced that the KVNM medal 2025 was awarded to flutist Eleonore Pameijer and the Leo Smit Foundation.

Annually or biennially,  KVNM awards prizes for graduation research, master's theses and dissertations in order to reward and highlight exceptional achievements in Dutch musicology. The most prestigious prize that the association awards is the KVNM Medal.

This is an award for a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the dissemination or deepening of knowledge about Dutch music culture through the spoken word, publication or performance. The KVNM medal was designed in 1982 by Jaap van Benthem: on the reverse side is the well-known l'homme armé melody as a symbol of the recipient as someone who has made a strong contribution to Dutch music culture. The medal has only been awarded 12 times, most recently in 2009 to Frits Zwart and the Netherlands Music Institute.

The chair of the KVNM medal jury, Professor Julia Kursell, professor of musicology at the University of Amsterdam, delivered the laudatory speech and presented the medal to Eleonore Pameijer, artistic director of the Leo Smit Foundation.

LAUDATORY SPEECH

When Eleonore Pameijer and Frans van Ruth founded the Leo Smit Foundation in 1996, their aim was to revive the music of composers who were persecuted and murdered before and during the Second World War.

The Foundation's activities over the past 30 years include dozens of Uilenburg concerts and the Forbidden Music Regained festival, now in its fifth year. In order to make the music of these persecuted composers accessible, more than 125 previously unpublished scores have been published in collaboration with the Netherlands Music Institute and Donemus. Dozens of CDs, radio recordings and podcasts, mostly by the Leo Smit Ensemble, contribute to the revival and dissemination of this music.

In addition, the book Verboden Componisten in Nederland (Forbidden Composers in the Netherlands) has been published, describing the lives and works of 35 persecuted composers – a valuable source of knowledge that will be accessible to an international community thanks to the English translation published in 2024.

The work of Eleonore Pameijer and the Leo Smit Foundation has now gained international recognition. The foundation has collaborated with various heritage institutions at national and international level. Musicians and researchers also have access to previously unknown repertoire via the English-language website “Forbidden Music Regained”.

The jury, consisting of Petra van Langen, Joris van Son and myself, concluded that it is thanks to the tireless efforts of the Leo Smit Foundation that the history of musical life in the Netherlands before and during the Second World War has been enriched and rewritten. The music that was not allowed to be heard sparkles – as we can hear today – like never before.

From the outset, Eleonore Pameijer has been the ambassador and driving force behind the Foundation. As a performing musician, she has also been constantly on the move, seeking out “forgotten” music off the beaten track and warming concert halls to it. Together with the board members, staff, volunteers and musicians of the Leo Smit Foundation, she has done this over the past thirty years in such a way that scientific research and performance practice have come together in an exemplary manner.

It is with great pleasure that I present the KVNM Medal to Eleonore Pameijer and the Leo Smit Foundation today.