During the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century many composers wanted to support the Flemish Movement with their work, resulting in a considerable corpus of compositions with an outspoken Flemish-nationalist character. In this repertoire we can roughly distinguish between works that make use of (the idiom) of Flemish folk song; works that celebrate Flemish-nationalist themes; and militant songs and choral works.

Flemish folk songs were used in Belgian instrumental compositions from the first half of the 19th century onwards; witness the Fantaisie nr. 3 sur trois airs populaires flamands for wind orchestra by Charles-Louis Hanssens Jr (1802–1871) and the piano paraphrases on Pierlala and Ei ’t was in de mei (“Hey it was in May”) by the virtuoso Philippe Vanden Berghe (1822–1885). Deploying folk songs in order to give a composition a Flemish character remained a long-standing habit; besides the countless choral settings and adaptations of folk songs, an outstanding orchestral example is Danses flamandes by Jan Blockx (1851–1912). Blockx’s mentor Peter Benoit rarely included folk songs in his compositions, but his melodic lines were inspired by a folk idiom.

Choral works, cantatas and oratorios frequently celebrated historical figures (public heroes, artists and writers) or landscapes and rivers. Frequently, this formed part of commissioned work for large-scale commemorations, often performed in the open air and for a mass audience. Examples from abroad included were Carla Maria von Weber’s Jubel-Cantate (1818, marking the jubilee of Friedrich August I of Saxony) or the Festkantate that Franz Liszt wrote for the 1845 inauguration of the Beethoven monument in Bonn. In Flanders it was Benoit who set the standard for this genre with his Rubens cantata (1877). Its original title, Vlaanderens kunstroem (“The glory of Flanders in the arts”), indicates the extent to which Rubens was celebrated in national terms. This popularity of the celebratory cantatas in Flemish cultural life helped to canonize and glorify specific Flemish lieux de mémoire: heroes or events known from Conscience’s historical novels (medieval civic leaders from Brugge and Gent; the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs; the Peasants’ Revolt of 1798); Conscience himself; or the Roland Bell from the Gent City Belfry, celebrated in verse as ringing the alarm  for civic liberty.

The lyrical drama, a flourishing genre in musical theatre around the mid-19th century, often featured historical figures as protagonists and dramatically presented the public’s glorious past through figures like Godefroy of Bouillon, Emperor Charles V, Rubens or Quinten Matsys. Towards the end of the 19th century, full-fledged operas along similar lines were also composed. The most important representative of this trend was Blockx. His opera Thyl Uylenspiegel (1900), about the mythical Flemish folk hero also celebrated in the 1867 Francophone-Belgian novel by Charles de Coster, premiered in French at the Brussels Monnaie Opera before being premiered in Flemish in Antwerp.

The vehicle par excellence for collective assertions of Flemish identity was the militant song. The most famous of these is De Vlaamse leeuw (“The Flemish lion”), composed in 1847 by Karel Miry on verses by Hippoliet Van Peene. Both lyrics and music are inspired by German examples: the words follow the pattern of Nikolaus Becker’s Rheinlied, the music cites Robert Schumann’s Sonntags am Rhein (“Sundays on the Rhine”). This song is now the official national anthem of the Flemish community.

The symbol of the Flemish lion, referring to the coat of arms of the counts of Flanders, was used in many militant songs after Miry, which also tended to invoke the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs celebrated in Conscience’s The lion of Flanders (1838). The Flemish nationalistic composer Jef Van Hoof (1886–1959), who at the beginning of the 20th century composed a great number of militant songs, managed to lift some of those songs above the clichés of the genre, for example through the use of poems of the priest-poet Guido Gezelle. Militant songs loomed large in the repertoire of Flemish nationalist manifestations, in mass singing events and often accompanied by a brass wind ensemble, using the combination of words and music, a propaganda strategy in the drive towards civic empowerment and national autonomy.