2223 results in Ethnomusicology
The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia
- Edited by Amanda Harris, Clint Bracknell
- Coming soon
-
- Expected online publication date:
- August 2024
- Print publication:
- 31 August 2024
-
- Book
- Export citation
-
As a companion to 'music in Australia', rather than 'Australian music', this book acknowledges the complexity and contestation inherent in the term 'Australia', whilst placing the music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its very heart. This companion emphasizes a diversity of musical experiences in the breadth of musical practice that flows though Australia, including Indigenous song, art music, children's music, jazz, country, popular music forms and music that blurs genre boundaries. Organised in four themed sections, the chapters present the latest research alongside perspectives of current creative artists to explore communities of practice and music's ongoing entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural practices, the influence of places near and far, of continuity, tradition, adaptation, and change. In the final chapter, we pick up where these chapters have taken us, asking what is next for music in Australia for the future.
Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
- Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet
- Björn Heile
- Coming soon
-
- Expected online publication date:
- May 2024
- Print publication:
- 30 May 2024
-
- Book
- Export citation
-
In the first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism, Björn Heile proposes a novel theory according to which musical modernism is constituted by a global diasporic network of composers, musicians and institutions. In a series of historical and analytical case studies from different parts of the world, this book overcomes the respective limitations of both Eurocentric and postcolonial, revisionist accounts, focusing instead on the transnational entanglements between the West and other world regions. Key topics include migration, the transnational reception and transfer of musical works and ideas, institutions such as the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and composers who are rarely discussed in Western academia, such as the Nigerian-born Akin Euba and the Korean-German Younghi Pagh-Paan. Influenced by the interdisciplinary notion of 'entangled histories', Heile critiques established dichotomies, all the while highlighting the unequal power relations on which the existing global order is founded.
23 - Nico Richter
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 217-224
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Almost all Nico Richter's surviving compositions date from his student days, and his talent never reached full maturity. Most of them are extremely short, inspired by Webern and Berg. As a student of medicine, he directed the Amsterdam student orchestra MUSA (the musical branch of the student association Unitas Studiosorum Amstelodamensium). He joined the Dutch resistance, was arrested in 1942 and sent to work in successive concentration camps. By now a physical wreck, he dictated his final composition on his deathbed, just after liberation.
Nico Max Richter was born in Amsterdam on 2 December 1915, the second of three children and the only son of the dentist Izaak Richter and his wife Sara Manheim, who both came from the Dutch province of North Holland. This assimilated Jewish family lived in the Vondelstraat, where Nico's father also practised. The Vondelstraat was and remains the site of the Catholic Vondelkerk, where as a small child Nico often went to listen to the music: there was an Adema organ and both a men's and a boys’ choir.
The young Richters went to the Agatha Deken school, which admitted children from the age of five. They had a professional music teacher, who taught theory to the first and second year. Richter took violin lessons from the ages of seven to fifteen from the viola teacher Jacques Muller. While still at elementary school, he was sometimes taken to the Concertgebouw, where he was impressed by the music and particularly by the conductor.
By the time he started secondary school, shortly before he turned twelve, Richter was already composing. He finished his first worked-out composition, a minuet in Mozart style for violin and piano, at thirteen. At fifteen he moved to a different violin teacher, Sam Tromp, second violin in the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He graduated from school at sixteen, excelling in mathematics and sciences, but was also very interested in languages and literature, as witness the sources of texts for his early compositions: Gezelle, Goethe, Gorter, Heine and Tennyson.
Richter's father insisted that he choose a ‘real’ profession. He enrolled as a student of medicine at the University of Amsterdam in the autumn of 1932 and immediately became a member of Unitas, the progressive student society.
5 - Lex van Delden
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 67-74
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
During the Second World War, Alexander Zwaap had to hide his identity by living under an alias, and in 1953, he legally changed his name to that alias, Lex van Delden. His life story is impressive, although he never spoke of the traumatic events he experienced during the war years, which he overcame with tremendous courage and resilience. Music was for him, as he often put it, a ‘transfer medium between people’. He took this approach with his compositions, since he wanted his music to communicate with its audience. Van Delden was a committed advocate for Dutch music and his social commitment was equally borne out in his readiness to hold several administrative posts, including the presidency of the Society of Dutch Composers (GeNeCo) and the chairmanship of the Bureau voor Muziekauteursrecht (Buma), the Dutch Performing Rights Organisation.
Alexander Zwaap was born on 10 September 1919 in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, on the Recht Boomssloot. He was the only child of Wolf and Sara Zwaap, who shared a house with his grandparents. The family was not Orthodox Jewish. As a youngster, he loved playing for the Amsterdam football club Ajax. Even during his medical studies, football remained an intrinsic part of his life. He never missed any of the club's competition games and became a regular in the Ajax boardroom. In the 1960s he wrote a weekly column about football, ‘From the stands, from the fields’, for Het Parool.
Zwaap's father was a teacher at a Jewish school and had worked with a colleague on operettas for children. He was also an amateur violinist, but there wasn't much music-making at home, although the family regularly went to the volksconcerten (‘people's concerts’). At the age of seven, he began piano lessons, initially with Martha Zwaga and later with the pianist Cor de Groot, who was only five years his senior but already a rising star.
Once while bedridden, he began jotting down some notes. It was a pleasant way to pass the time. In spite of his artistic promise (at the age of sixteen, he had a part-time job as a ballet accompanist), his ambition was to become a neurosurgeon, and in 1938 he enrolled at the Municipal University of Amsterdam to study medicine.
3 - Henriëtte Bosmans
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 47-56
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Henriëtte Bosmans had already enjoyed a well-established reputation as a pianist in pre-war Dutch musical life, although as a female composer she received less recognition in the Netherlands, except from colleagues and friends. Her considerable output includes orchestral works, chamber music and many songs. During the war she was not allowed to appear in public and had to support herself with ‘underground’ house concerts.
Henriëtte Hilda Bosmans was born on 6 December 1895, the only child of Henri Bosmans (1856–96) and Sara Benedicts Bosmans (1861–1949). Her father, who had been the principal cellist of the newly established Concertgebouw Orchestra, died when she was only a baby. Her mother, a piano teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, gave Henriëtte her first piano lessons. At seventeen she passed her final piano examination at the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (Society for the Advancement of Music). She studied music theory and composition with Jan Willem Kersbergen and composition with Willem Pijper, who happened to be her neighbour at the time. During the 1930s Bosmans performed regularly with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. At one of their prestigious Thursday evening concerts in 1936, she was the soloist in César Franck's Variations symphoniques, with Willem Mengelberg conducting. The critic Herman Rutters, writing in the Algemeen Handelsblad, praised her interpretation as ‘shrewd, intuitive, with pure, vibrant and noble musicianship’.
The cellist Marix Loevensohn6 often performed her Poème for cello and orchestra, which she had written for him in 1926, and Louis Zimmermann, concert-master of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, premiered the Concert Piece for violin and orchestra in 1935, conducted by Mengelberg. Her international breakthrough came in 1938 when the violinist Willem Noske8 played the Concert Piece, full of ‘Oriental moods’, in Prague and Paris. In October 1941 it was also performed several times in the United States by the violinist Ruth Posselt. The prospect of further international engagements was then curtailed by the war.
Interference by the Nazis in cultural life was in evidence long before the war. In 1933 the Maandblad voor Hedendaagsche Muziek (‘Monthly Magazine for Contemporary Music’), published in Amsterdam from1931 to 1933, ran an article entitled ‘Terror in German
7 - Marius Flothuis
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 85-92
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Marius Flothuis led an eventful life. He was politically aware and inclined to left-wing views from an early age. He lost his job at the Concertgebouw Orchestra when he refused to register with the Kultuurkamer, and was arrested for his involvement with the Dutch resistance. Imprisoned in Camp Vught and deported to Sachsenhausen in 1944, he survived its hardships and continued to compose. In the post-war Dutch and international music worlds he held numerous influential positions.
Born on 30 October 1914 in Amsterdam, Flothuis was raised in a well-to-do family. His father played the violin and as a child Marius loved listening to his mother playing Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte on the piano. At around the age of six he learned the basics of piano-playing from his brother Joop, who was five years older. It was not long before he surprised everyone by playing Pleyel's Sonatina in D major. From then on, music never truly let him go. His piano teachers were his uncle George Hamel, Bé Boef, Arend Koole and Hans Brandts Buys. The latter, his music teacher at the Amsterdam Vossius Gymnasium, was a major influence and a stimulating mentor.
Flothuis was a timid, withdrawn boy, but his talents were gradually recognised at the Gymnasium. At fourteen, he surprised his piano teacher, Arend Koole, with his own cadenzas for Haydn's D major Piano Concerto and, soon afterwards, his cadenzas for some of the Mozart piano concertos. He often played the piano with his brother, mostly symphonic repertoire arranged for four hands. Joop introduced him to music by Debussy, Ravel and other French composers, which proved an enormous revelation.
Flothuis was fifteen when he first performed on the piano at one of the high school's musical evenings. Brandts Buys encouraged him to play the piano, arrange music and conduct the school orchestra. Flothuis was strongly influenced by contemporary composers and he attempted to emulate the string quartets by Hindemith and Milhaud, but these early effortswere soon consigned to oblivion. At seventeen, he passed his high school exams and the piano and theory exams of the Koninklijke Nederlandse ToonkunstenaarsVereniging (the Royal Dutch Musicians Association), his programme including Mozart – with his own cadenzas – and a composition by Willem Pijper.
4 - Fania Chapiro
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 57-66
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Fania Chapiro was born in 1926 in Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies), on the island of Java, to a Russian father and Dutch mother. Her parents recognised the exceptional musical talent of their only child, and made many sacrifices to support it. When she wrote in her diary in early 1935: ‘I have decided to become a composer and a wonderful pianist’, she could never have expected a war to intervene. She was half-Jewish, which would affect the course of her life, but she persevered, and achieved a successful career as a pianist and composer.
Her father, Naum Chapiro, was a violin teacher, and so she was raised in a musical environment. Fania, when still a toddler, tried to play with his violin, but it soon became clear that the piano was going to be her instrument. She put her heart and soul into it and, by the age of six, concerts of the young prodigy were featured in the newspapers. In those days, musicians often included Java on their tours. One of them, the renowned pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, was present at one of Fania's concerts, and was convinced that she ought to study in Paris, where her exceptional talent could be developed. She was just eight years old when, in 1934, her parents decided to take this huge step. The pianist Lazare-Lévy, a kind and sympathetic personality, became her teacher; it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Many of Lazare-Lévy's piano students went on to successful careers. He firmly believed in Fania's obvious talent, although she was discouraged by setbacks encountered along the way. Her theoretical skills appeared to be inadequate at that time, and at the Conservatoire she had to work hard to pass the exams. Lazare-Lévy asked her to compose something for the ‘sight-reading class’, which she did, but playing the piano was her core objective.
Fania and her parents spent every summer holiday in the Netherlands with family, where her father eagerly tried to introduce his daughter into the Dutch music scene, but with the outbreak of war in 1939 they were forced to remain, and they moved into an apartment in Bezuidenhout in The Hague.
The Contributors
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 21-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
32 - Max Vredenburg
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 293-302
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Max Vredenburg is primarily known for his pioneering role in the establishment of Jeugd en Muziek Nederland (Youth and Music in the Netherlands). As a music critic, he worked for almost all the Dutch newspapers, sharing his extensive knowledge with his readers. As a composer, he left a varied output. A special man, who honestly and tirelessly expressed his love for music, he was modest and amiable, with an exemplary work ethic and a keen desire to achieve his goals.
Max David Vredenburg was born in Brussels on 16 January 1904 and was raised in a Dutch-Jewish family. To escape the violence of war they fled to The Hague. Max was only eleven, and at that stage was more comfortable with French rather than with Dutch. In 1922, after high school, he began working for a company that imported dried fruit, but he soon resigned: his heart lay with music. He studied theory and composition at The Hague Conservatoire with the composer Henri Geraedts (1892–1975), who advised him to attend the École Normale de Musique in Paris, and so, during 1926 and 1927, he studied with Paul Dukas – and he also met Albert Roussel, whose music had always inspired him. He now began to compose seriously. Roussel introduced him to one of the leading publishing houses at that time, Éditions Maurice Senart, which published his song Vous m’avez dit without charging him a fee. His Six pièces pour piano were published by Enoch & Cie, also based in Paris.
Back in The Hague he joined the Social Democratic newspaper Vooruit (‘Onwards’) and the annual journal De Socialistische Gids as a music critic. He also began teaching at the Conservatoire. His interest in contemporary music, already aroused in Paris, continued to grow. He co-founded the successful Haagsche Studiekring voor Moderne Muziek (The Hague Study Group for Modern Music), which premiered works by Hindemith, Janáček, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Dutch contemporaries; for three years he served as its director and gave performances at its concerts. He also served as a board member for the Nederlandsche Vereeniging voor Hedendaagse Muziek (Contemporary Music Society of the Netherlands), founded by the composer and conductor Daniel Ruyneman (1886–1963), and was the editor of its monthly magazine. His articles were published in such periodicals as the Amsterdam monthly Caecilia.
19 - Bertus van Lier
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 185-192
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Bertus van Lier was born in Utrecht on 10 September 1906 and was interested in music from an early age. At the age of eight he took cello lessons at the local music school in his home town and he sang in the boys’ choir, performing Bach's St Matthew Passion. During his early years as a pupil at the Utrecht City Gymnasium, he was fascinated by the problems of composing music. In 1923, at sixteen years old, he completed his first composition, Prologue for cello and piano. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of his gymnasium, Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae was performed, with incidental music by Willem Pijper; Van Lier was given the demanding role of Messenger for which he was commended in the press. He was much inspired by this experience and decided he would be a composer, beginning as a student of Pijper. In an interview dated 3 June 1964 Van Lier tells the interviewer:
I met Pijper for the first time at the Utrecht Gymnasium around 1925. We celebrated the lustrum with the performance of Euripides’ Bacchae. I was part of the cast. The music was Pijper’s. I had been composing from my 12th year on and I was very much impressed by Pijper's music. I cornered him and he looked at my music and he said: ‘Alright, I’ll give you lessons’. But after I passed my final examination of the gymnasium, he told me: ‘First of all get yourself registered at the Conservatorium!’ And that is how things went.
Deciding on his programme at the Amsterdam Conservatoire proved a little complicated: Pijper was teaching harmony, not composition, and van Lier decided to study with Pijper privately. He wanted to study singing as his main subject, but Pijper refused to accept a singer as his composition student. Van Lier therefore studied cello at the Conservatoire, as a student of Max Orobio de Castro. Meanwhile, van Lier's father nourished hopes that his only son would study law, to follow in his father's footsteps as director of the Utrechtsche Hypotheekbank (Utrecht Mortgage Bank), but when his son presented his First Symphony in 1927–28, there were no longer any doubts about his chosen career.
11 - Bob Hanf
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 115-124
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Bob Hanf was born in Amsterdam on 25 November 1894. His parents, Joseph Hanf and Laura Romberg, assimilated German Jews, were originally from Westphalia and had settled in the Netherlands shortly after their marriage. Bob grew up in an affluent, artistic environment: his mother was an accomplished pianist. He received his first violin lessons in the ensemble classes led by George Scager, a violist in the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Until the age of 30, he spent most of his holidays in Germany with his uncle Moritz and aunt Rebecca, whose inner circle included several artists and intellectuals. Thanks to these regular visits, Hanf, at an early age, came into contact with the latest movements in art, literature and philosophy.
Hanf showed a genuine talent for drawing and he received lessons from the famous Amsterdam painter George Breitner. He became a versatile artist: drawing, painting, writing, playing the violin and composing. But his father wanted his son to succeed him at the chemical company ‘N. V. Oranje’, and so Hanf enrolled at the Technical University in Delft, studying chemistry and architecture. During his studies he drew caricatures of his professors and classmates, and he made a large number of charcoal drawings in an Expressionist style, resembling those of Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There was also plenty of music-making in Delft; Hanf often played with the composers Harold C. King and Ignace Lilien. In 1919, he co-founded ‘In die Coornschuere’ (‘In the Grain Warehouse’), named after the Delft warehouse in which it was based, where he organised concerts, lectures and exhibitions.
Around this time, Hanf met the writers Hendrik Marsman, Jan Spierdijk and Simon Vestdijk. Marsman wrote in his book Self-portrait of J. F. and Other Prose: ‘Hanf, slightly bent, somewhat tired, the collar of his jacket straight up, violin case carefully under his arm, entered the long narrow room on the Voorstraat [in Delft], where we awaited him around a scorching stove’. In Vestdijk's book The Last Chance, Hanf is portrayed as ‘Bob Neumann’. Hanf himself wrote two plays, three novels and several poems, influenced by Frank Wedekind's anti-bourgeois morality and Franz Kafka's surrealistic atmosphere and gloomy world view.
33 - Ferenc/Franz Weisz
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 303-310
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Franz Weisz (Weisz Ferenc in Hungarian) decided to leave his home country, Hungary, because of the unstable political situation and its anti-Semitism. In the Netherlands he enjoyed two decades of personal and musical freedom before being deported to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where he died. Weisz was an exceptional pianist who left behind an output of several virtuoso piano pieces.
Born in Budapest on 2 August 1893, Ferenc Weisz was the third son of Ignaz Weisz and Terezia Friedman. He was a musical prodigy and by the age of eleven was a student at the Nemzeti Zenede, the National Conservatoire. He studied piano with Stephan Tomka and composition with Károly Aggházy, both former students of Liszt. In 1914, Weisz completed his education with excellent results in both disciplines.
During the First World War, Hungary fought on the Austrian side and lost. It is unknown whether Weisz took part. After the war, the political situation worsened: a split from Austria, revolution and counter-revolution, a rapid succession of rulers, first the Communist Béla Kun, followed by Miklós Horthy and increasing anti-Semitism. It is likely that Weisz gave piano lessons at this time, maybe even recitals (although Jewish musicians were increasingly barred from public performances). In 1919, he was appointed as a teacher at the Conservatoire in Budapest. He left for the Netherlands in 1920.
The family story goes that ‘during a concert tour’ in 1920, Weisz chose to stay in Amsterdam, but the reality was probably more prosaic. His fame as a pianist was not such that an international concert tour was plausible. His older brother, Simon, had preceded him to the Netherlands and his aunt, married to an Amsterdam diamond-worker, had lived there for 40 years. Amsterdam seemed to be a safe haven after the war, the Netherlands having remained neutral. Weisz was embraced by his ever-growing family in Amsterdam. ‘Uncle Ferri’ was a welcome guest in his brother Simon's home, always present when Hungarian goulash was on the menu.
As a pianist, one among several other Hungarian exiles, Ferenc quickly adapted to the Amsterdam music scene. A fellow countryman, the violinist Alfred Indig, who like Weisz had graduated from the National Conservatoire, was now a member of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
21 - Israel Olman
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 201-208
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Up until the Second World War, Israel J. Olman had been a celebrated choral conductor and composer. He wrote synagogal music as well as music for socialist choirs, to be performed at major singing competitions. His fame, and the fact that he was married to a Catholic, offered him some protection during the war. In the post-war years his reputation as a composer rapidly diminished, resulting in financial difficulties. The world had changed, and his musical idiom had become outdated.
It must have been a memorable evening, on 5 October 1924 in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, when the composer, conductor and teacher Israel Olman was honoured by the Union of Workers’ Choral Societies on his 25th anniversary as a music professional. His works were performed by five choirs, and together, under the composer's direction, they premiered his new work Sullima. The programme booklet summarised the significance of Olman's skill as a musician, outlining how he had matured as a composer, appealing particularly to those who loved and promoted melodious choral works.
Now, over 50 years after his death, Israel Jacques Olman (usually known as Ies), whose reputation has faded into oblivion, deserves a revival. He was born on 17 August 1883 in the Sint Anthoniebreestraat, in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. His parents were part of the Jewish proletariat identifying more with the growing socialist movement of the late nineteenth century than adhering to Orthodox Judaism. His mother, Raatje Hamel, came from a musical family and his father, Jesaias (Jacques), was an amateur singer and a diamond worker, who worked his way up to become a broker in pearls and diamonds.
He was a talented child. At six, he started violin lessons and at twelve he was enrolled at a music school. His father was in favour of a wide-ranging musical as well as a solid general education. By 1895 he was studying violin, piano, music theory, choral singing and composition. He was taught, among others, by the renowned choir conductor and composer Frederik Roeske, the composer Bernard Zweers, who taught at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, and the conductor and organist Evert Cornelis.
1 - Daniël Belinfante
-
- By Marcel Worms
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 29-36
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Daniël Belinfante's manuscripts, donated in 1955 to the Netherlands Music Institute in The Hague by his widow Martha Belinfante-Dekker, remained untouched for decades. His output contains some 100 compositions, consisting of solo concertos, an orchestral suite, string quartets, works for strings and piano, songs and choral works. The neglect is not new: Belinfante's music was rarely performed during his lifetime. After his violent death in Fürstengrube, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, it would take 60 years before his music was rediscovered.
Belinfante was born in the Watergraafsmeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam on 6 March 1893, the third child in a family of ten. He received his first violin lessons from his father, Aron, a diamond worker, and his uncle Sidney, and studied piano with Ary Belinfante, his great-uncle, the director of a music school in the centre of Amsterdam. In 1915 Belinfante continued the family tradition, becoming director of a music school in the Watergraafsmeer, where he also taught piano and composition. Although the building on the corner of the Hogeweg and Pythagorasstraat still exists, it is no longer recognisable as a music school.
In 1923 Belinfante married his student Martha Dekker, and together they continued running the school. In addition to lessons in classical music – primarily given by musicians from the Concertgebouw Orchestra – they launched a jazz curriculum for both amateur and advanced music students. In 1934, long before jazz was introduced at Dutch conservatoires, they established the Eerste Hollandsche Jazzklasse (First Dutch Jazz College). Lessons were offered in jazz piano, trumpet, double-bass, trombone, sousaphone, tuba, banjo, mandolin, clarinet, flute, saxophone and percussion.
Belinfante composed a Concertino for piano and orchestra for his students. This piece was broadcast with two eight-year-old soloists and the VARA Radio Orchestra on 2 June 1937. A caption underneath a photograph of Belinfante as conductor reads: ‘Performance by the school orchestra during the second movement of the piano concertino under the direction of the composer in the Recital Hall – Amsterdam Concertgebouw’. Little is known about other concerts of Belinfante's work; most probably, the performances that did take place were private. Belinfante may have been too insecure about his music to expose it to a wider public. On the other hand, one imagines that a composer needs feedback to define his or her creative position and, if necessary, make adjustments.
Index
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 343-356
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Contents
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 5-6
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
16 - Leo Kok
-
- By Marcel Worms
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 159-166
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The term ‘homo universalis’ or Renaissance Man originated as a description of individuals who helped humanity escape the dark ages by virtue of their open minds and tenacious pursuit of new knowledge. Leo Kok was such a polymath during his own lifetime. He was a gifted football player, a pianist of the highest order, a vocal coach and a composer. He also had an immense interest in literature and politics. As an anti-fascist activist, he joined the Dutch resistance movement during the Second World War. He survived torture in Buchenwald, but his piano career was ruined. After the war, he turned his passion to literature and books.
Leo Kok was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1893. His Portuguese-Jewish mother died during childbirth; his father died when he was eight years old. He was raised by his grandmother and, after her death, by an aunt in The Hague. Perhaps these early losses and premature independence played a role in his many activities as a youngster. He graduated from the Rotterdam Maritime Academy and studied piano at the Conservatoire in The Hague. His composition teacher was Willem Pijper, whom Kok admired for his experimental style. It is believed that Kok played the Dutch premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. In the meantime, he also excelled at boxing and football and was even selected for the Dutch national football team, which brought him eventually to Paris, the city that would play a pivotal role in his life.
In 1919, he married the flamboyant singer Hetty Marx, but Kok, who was a charming, flirtatious man, was not cut out for married life. Hetty and their son Iddo saw little of him in those first few years. He was already working as a pianist and a conductor aboard a cruise liner, with regular services between Rotterdam and Rio de Janeiro, and he spent long periods of time in Brazil and Argentina.
In the 1920s and 1930s he was living alternately in Paris and Ascona in Switzerland and worked as a vocal coach. He reputedly had a beautiful baritone voice. From 1924, he performed with the violinist Lidus Klein van Giltay, the Finnish cellist Lennart von Zweyberg and other musicians. He spent a year in Berlin as the accompanist to, among others, the German dancer Charlotte Bara, to whom he dedicated the last of his Trois danses exotiques for piano.
27 - Leo Smit
-
- By Jurjen Vis
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 247-256
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Leo Smit's music sounds thoroughly French, with bright and breezy notes that seemingly flow easily from his pen. In reality, it took many years before his musical ideas were incorporated into his compositions. And however French it may sound, Smit was heart and soul attached to Amsterdam and the Netherlands. His song for women's choir, De bruid (‘The Bride’), set to words by Jan Prins, is a declaration of love: ‘The groom was the sunlight and Holland was his bride’. It took years before his legacy would reach an international audience.
Leo Smit came from a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi family: his father, Rephaël Smit, was a wealthy shoe-merchant descended from an Ashkenazi family, and the other three grandparents, two of whom were also cousins, were descended from the Sephardic Ricardo family. Leo's grandfather, Jozef David Smit, was a teacher and cantor in the synagogue. Born on 14 May 1900 in Amsterdam, Leo was raised in a mainly secularised family in which there was hardly any connection to Jewish tradition, which is reflected in the names of both children: Leopold and Eleonore Josephine (Nora).
Smit studied at the gymnasium until the age of seventeen and left school without a diploma; he was determined to pursue a career in music. He took music-lessons from a young age and wrote his first composition at the age of sixteen. From 1919 he studied piano and composition with Sem Dresden and Bernard Zweers, among others, at the Amsterdam Conservatoire. In 1924, he was the first student in the history of the Conservatoire to graduate cum laude in composition. Early on, and throughout his career, his orchestral works were performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, under the direction of prominent conductors such as Cornelis Dopper,3 Pierre Monteux and Eduard van Beinum.
He briefly taught harmony, theory and music analysis at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, but in 1927 he moved to Paris to broaden his musical horizons. Smit's ties with the Netherlands remained strong and he received several lucrative commissions. His music for the anniversary games of the universities of Leiden and Delft attracted considerable attention. He also wrote music for films, a new genre for an industry still in its infancy. A major success was his music for Charley Huguenot van der Linden's film Jonge Harten (‘Young Hearts’).
20 - Ignace Lilien
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 193-200
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Ignace Lilien's home-town, Lemberg, known as Lviv in Ukrainian, and as Lwów in Polish, has a history of occupation by shifting powers. That is why the Germans had trouble establishing Lilien's true identity and how he survived the war with forged documents. He worked as a chemical engineer, but that didn't stop him from composing a large body of work. His life was as varied as his music, with influences ranging from Polish modernism to South American rhythms and timbres.
Lilien was born on 29 May 1897 in multicultural Lemberg, at that time an Austrian city where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews were the largest communities. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was a bustling metropolis; with an elegant new opera house, it was often referred to as ‘Little Vienna’. Around 1890, some Zionist organisations emerged, but the majority of the Jewish population was assimilated. Most spoke Polish, like the Lilien family, or German. Ignacy (his Polish name) was a linguistic prodigy. He expressed himself easily in German, French, Russian and English. His parents, Ernest Lilien and Emma Czeszer, had married in 1895. Ernest was the managing director of an agricultural bank and imported farm machinery from the United States; he moved there in 1913. A year later the couple divorced.
Ignace and a friend, who had been touring Europe by bicycle to visit all the significant museums, were in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the First World War. Travelling was too dangerous and on his mother's advice he remained in The Hague for the time being. She was now living in Geneva, remarried in 1916 to Conte Mario Gialina, an Italian architect. In 1919, still in the Netherlands, Ignace completed his First Symphony and he moved to Delft to study at the Technical University. In 1922, he obtained a degree in chemical engineering, and until his retirement in 1962 he was employed at the Chemical Products Factory (FCP, Fabriek voor Chemische Producten) in Pernis, near Rotterdam. He never returned to Lemberg.
Lilien arrived in the Netherlands with a rich musical heritage. He had studied piano with Theodor Pollak at the highly esteemed Ludwig Marek music school. Born in 1866 in Telč in southern Moravia, Pollak had studied in Vienna with such prominent teachers as Anton Door, Julius Epstein and Moriz Rosenthal. In Lemberg, Pollak's students were mainly from aristocratic and wealthy families.
13 - Julius Hijman
- Edited by Carine Alders, Eleonore Pameijer
- Foreword by Michael Haas
-
- Book:
- Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 May 2024, pp 135-142
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Julius Hijman's career as a pianist centred on contemporary and Dutch music. Touring internationally, he presented the works of Dutch composers, and in the Netherlands he introduced new music from abroad, although his own compositions were not always appreciated by his audiences. He emigrated to America in 1939. The majority of his extensive output remains unpublished and awaits performance.
Julius Hijman was born on 25 January 1901 in Almelo, in the eastern Netherlands, at that time a town with a prosperous textile industry. His Jewish parents, the physician Leopold Hijman and Catherina Lion, were members of the local elite and had many friends among the captains of industry in the town. Julius and his younger sister, Renée, had piano lessons at an early age. He was talented and so went on to study privately with Marie Jannette Walen, a renowned concert pianist in Hilversum, some 70 miles from home – a long way to travel for a youngster. At sixteen he moved to Amsterdam, but stayed only six months before moving to Bussum, a small town near Utrecht, where he continued to develop his talent. In 1922, he became a member of the Trio Kwant from Utrecht, named after the flautist Cor Kwant, and returned to Amsterdam. This time he studied piano with Dirk Schäfer, whom he much admired, and composition and music theory with Sem Dresden.
In the 1920s, Hijman emerged as an ardent advocate of contemporary music. He formed a duo with the cellist Henk van Wezel. Then, in quick succession, both his parents died, and he left the Netherlands to pursue his studies with Paul Weingarten in Vienna. There he found the love of his life, Margarete Safir; the couple married in January 1926.
But Amsterdam was never far from his mind and in 1928 he and van Wezel devised their own concert series, focusing on contemporary music, including works by such composers as Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith and Kodály – and the audience attending a concert at De Kunstkring (the Amsterdam Art Society) promoted as a ‘Romantic Evening’ must have been surprised to hear music by Hindemith and Reger.