All sought political, economic and cultural self-determination. Each new geographical entity wanted - and needed - its own literature, dance, music. In Belgium, for example, Art Nouveau became the signature national architecture.

Music in Flanders concentrated largely around the Antwerp Conservatory and its formidable head of composition, Peter Benoit. The favourite pupil of this musical patriarch was a young man from Antwerp named Lodewijk Mortelmans (1868-1952) whose Homerische Symphonie, now recorded by the British independent label Hyperion, allows us to witness the birth of the Flemish symphony, as well as serving as a milestone in Belgian cultural evolution.

There's little notably Flemish-sounding about this grandiloquent, hour-long musical of episodes from the Iliad. Another composer, August de Boeck, was more adept at incorporating folk and popular tunes into his music. But Mortelmans' symphony is important for marking a decisive break with the French influence of vocal writing, and thus embodied the Flemish cultural resistance as a whole.

Mortelmans' Flemish pride did not stop him from accepting the award as winner of the Belgian category of France's greatest composition prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1893. But he was ever dedicated to Flanders, drawing up never-realised plans for a Flemish operatic festival along the lines of Wagner's annual bash at Bayreuth in Bavaria. Hyperion's CD, featuring the Royal Flemish Orchestra under the baton of the adventurous British maestro Martyn Brabbins, is not the first appearance of Mortelmans' music in commercial recordings.

The now defunct Discover International label commissioned some of his orchestral works in the early 1990s, as did the Naxos company, including the Mythe der lente (Myth of Spring) and Morgenstemming (Morning Mood), also heard here.

Flemish radio stations like Klara have also recorded Mortelmans' works, and one enterprising fan has even uploaded clips of performances of the composer's rare-as-hen's-teeth piano miniatures to YouTube. Is it too much to hope that a Flemish body will do what it's taken a British record label to do and dust off some of these hidden treasures? Mortelmans could certainly make a joyful noise, and it's time the whole country made a bit more of a din about this first Belgian symphonist.