dutch composers

[fliszt]

hi,

I am from Holland and i was wondering if you guys here are familiar with some dutch composer and what do you think of their music?? I'm talking about Daniel ruyneman, Ton de leeuw or Andriessen. Perhaps you know their music?

[indutrial]

hi,

I am from Holland and i was wondering if you guys here are familiar with some dutch composer and what do you think of their music?? I'm talking about Daniel ruyneman, Ton de leeuw or Andriessen. Perhaps you know their music?

I've studied works by 20th century Dutch composers and the music is fabulous. Holland is like Denmark, Belgium, and every east European country in the sense that it's got a very strong music tradition and some amazingly prolific composers, yet the repertoire's almost totally unknown in the U.S. because our institutions are so Anglo-, Franco-, and German-centric.

One of my favorite composers from the Netherlands is Hans Kox, who has written a ton of amazing chamber music for saxophones and strings. He was a student of Henk Badings, another great Dutch composer whose work ranged from neoclassicalist to experimental. Another interesting composer is Jan van Dijk, an extremely prolific composer who's written his way to opus 1200 or something similarly wacky. The style combines the best elements of Hindemith's neoclassicism and other adventurous free-tonal ideas. I'm hoping that someday his insanely large ouevre will come to light, especially his 50-odd piano sonatinas/sonatas and his brutally large amount of chamber work. There's some info on him here (https://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/english/dijk.html). A number of Dutch guys were also responsible for the development of an interesting 31-tone system incorporating numerous microtones and playable on a very strange organ.

The Netherlands is definitely a country with a strongly academic music background (similar to France and Denmark) and it really came into its own in the 20th century. I'm currently waiting on over $100 worth of chamber scores from Hans Kox to study this coming spring.

[fliszt]

thnk u indutrial

you're the only one who is replying on this subject....can i make the conclusion that only a few a familiar with dutch composers??

I'm still wondering why....

[franz_]

Hi, I'm from Belgium. In my opinion we, and Holland, have some good composers but they are not genius... I don't know the composers in Holland, but here we have some good composers as Devreese, Jonghen and Brossé for filmmusic.

[indutrial]

Hi, I'm from Belgium. In my opinion we, and Holland, have some good composers but they are not genius... I don't know the composers in Holland, but here we have some good composers as Devreese, Jonghen and Brossé for filmmusic.

Belgium and Holland both have genius composers - loads of them. These days, there are brilliant composers hidden in every corner of the earth, from Australia to Denmark to South America. It's a matter of finding them. In the U.S., we're pretty much bombarded by constant associations of classical music with Germany, and if we're lucky, maybe France or England. It's a short-sighted tendency that is likely based out of the market-share point of view that see's things only as Mozart=sales, Bach=sales, Beethoven=sales, Brahms=sales.

In terms of Belgian composers, I am a big fan of Jean Absil, who was pigeonholed as a Belgian off-shoot of the French neoclassical composers like Darius Milhaud. I would argue that his music definitely has plenty of its own unique characteristics and that he made significant contributions to classical guitar literature in a region of Europe that was not known for guitar compositions. In addition to Absil, I've always admired the borderline-atonal work of Marcel Quinet, who wrote a lot of unusual chamber pieces (like a great work for four clarinets and strings). In recent years, I've admired Belgian composer Walter Hus, who's composed a brilliant set of prelude/fugue books for one/two pianos.

To get an idea of how active and dynamic the music scene is in Holland, check out www.donemus.nl . For Belgium, www.cebedem.be . Both countries very strong 20th century heritages that should not be brushed aside.

I would say that both countries exhibit a similar musical development to France, which did not really get a strong reputation until almost 1900, when Faure's works were increasingly played and Debussy was coming to the fore. However, France's ascending into the limelight and Germany/Austria's second wind (Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith etc...) made it very hard for smaller countries to shine through. Even a Swiss composer like Conrad Beck is a relative unknown, though his works could definitely stand alongside Hindemith's compositions in a concert progamme. Most of the best composers from Poland, Czech, Estonia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine (who I would argue produce incredibly consistent work) are still treated like exoticisms by Western musicians who can't ease off of the German teet.

[franz_]

Thanks for the nice comments. May I ask you how it comes you know so lot about us and our composers?

[indutrial]

I started studying music from Holland, Denmark, Poland, the Baltic countries and Belgium a few years back when I purchased a huge lot of used CDs and LPs from my local used record store that included lots of 20th century composers I hadn't heard much of. I believe that a guy who used to DJ at a college music station passed away and left behind all of that.  In each case, you could say there was a kernel that made me discover lots of other stuff. In the case of Holland, one of the CDs was an excellent-sounding Donemus release of Hans Kox's three violin concertos. From Kox's biography, I discovered the works of his teacher Henk Badings.  In Denmark's case, there was a disc called "Breath and Wings", which featured clarinet/bass clarinet works by Niels Viggo Bentzon, Per Norgard, and Ib Norholm - three of Denmark's most excellent composers. Since I was an E-Music subscriber also, I was able to download loads of other Danish discs printed on Denmark's Da Capo and Danacord labels, including lots of Per Norgard's pieces and Vagn Holmboe's string quartets. I forget how I discovered Belgium's composers, but I'm glad I did. Before I studied music, I specialized in the history of Eastern Europe and Russia, so I'd come to be very used to studying various aspects of specific nationalities and smaller countries. As with the written literature of these countries, historical circumstances virtually dictates that it will be difficult for them to gain exposure in the outside world, at least at the same pace that larger countries enjoy.

Since I'm firstly a music historian and secondly a composer/theorist/performer, I generally spend lots more time searching for new things to listen to and exploring the minutiae on different composers, including many who are not considered a big deal in the wider music world.

[webern78]

As far as historical composers go, i can't allow to leave Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck unmentioned. He is considered to be the first in line in the organ school that culminated with Bach, and he is the father of the baroque fugue.

Christopher Herrick released a nice recording of assorted organ music which is pretty impressive considering how primitive keyboard music still was at the end of Renaissance.

[dave santino]

I'm a big fan of Andriessen, Mengelberg, the ICP, Orkest de Volhaarding, that whole scene. One of my composition lecturers studied with Andriessen and subsequently was very influenced by him, so he exposes us to a lot of their work. I saw Guus Jannssen in concert a couple of weeks ago at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and was mightily impressed.