Diderik Wagenaar (born 10 May 1946 in Utrecht) is a Dutch composer and musical theorist.
Wagenaar has lived and worked all his adult life in The Hague. Born to a musical family that includes Johan Wagenaar, he began playing piano at the age of eight and by the time he was fourteen had set his sights on a musical vocation. As a teenager in the early 1960s he loved Renaissance music, Bach, Ravel, and Thelonious Monk; at the age of eighteen he began studying music theory with Jan van Dijk, Hein Kien and Rudolf Koumans and piano with Simon Admiraal at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. As a composer he is essentially self-taught.
It was during his student years in the mid-60s that Wagenaar began to develop as a composer. Although fascinated by the concerts given by Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna with the Hague Philharmonic, he admits to having "no real grip" at that time on the musical avant-garde, and began to look around for other starting-points for his own music. In addition to his fascination with jazz, an important encounter at that time was with the music of Charles Ives, which taught him the value of inclusivity. It also encouraged his tendency to attempt a synthesis between tonality and atonality, to connect previously disparate systems of musical thought. Today Wagenaar feels that the notion of a "music of inclusion" can be seen as an important aspect of the new Dutch music as a whole.
His music is closely linked with that of his friend Louis Andriessen and treats similar ideas in perhaps an even more rigorous manner. Though the ideas may be complex, they are always presented in a clear and straightforward manner. His other influences include Stravinsky, a key figure for the composers of the Hague school, but also importantly Monk and John Coltrane.
His works include commissions for the ensembles Orkest de Volharding, Hoketus, Slagwerkgroep den Haag and Icebreaker and for the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Louis Andriessen was a Dutch composer, pianist and academic teacher. Considered the most influential Dutch composer of his generation, he was a central proponent of The Hague school of composition. Although his music was initially dominated by neoclassicism and serialism, his style gradually shifted to a synthesis of American minimalism, jazz and the manner of Stravinsky.
Jasna Veličković has been living and working as a composer in the Netherlands since 2001 where she completed a Masters in music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under Louis Andriessen, Gilius van Bergeijk and Clarence Barlow with distinction. She completed her Bachelors in composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade under Srdjan Hofman.
Ivo van Emmerik is a Dutch composer.
Hoketus was an amplified musical ensemble founded by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in the Netherlands in 1976. The group was originally formed to perform Louis Andriessen's minimal composition Hoketus, but remained together and began to perform music composed for the group by other composers. The group disbanded in 1987.
Alphonsus Johannes Maria Diepenbrock was a Dutch composer, essayist and classicist.
Icebreaker is a UK-based new music ensemble founded by James Poke and John Godfrey. They interpret new music, specialising in a post-minimal and "totalist" repertoire. Icebreaker always play amplified and have a reputation for playing, by classical standards, "seriously loud". They have expanded their repertoire to include non-classical material, particularly in their version of the Brian Eno album Apollo, a project based on the music of Kraftwerk, and music by Scott Walker.
Antonius Wilhelmus Adrianus de Leeuw was a Dutch composer. He occasionally experimented with microtonality.
Gilius van Bergeijk is a Dutch composer.
Ivana Kiš is a Croatian composer of classical music, electronic music and music theatre.
John Godfrey is a composer and performer, co-founder and musical director of Icebreaker (1989-1997), founder member of Crash Ensemble (1997–present), founder of the Quiet Music Ensemble, and lecturer in music at National University of Ireland, Cork.
Michel van der Aa is a Dutch composer of contemporary classical music.
Cornelis de Bondt is a Dutch composer. Born in The Hague, de Bondt attended the Royal Conservatory there and currently teaches composition and music theory at the same institution.
Jan Boerman was a Dutch composer who specialised in electronic music from 1959. He was born in The Hague. The Delft Polytechnic in Utrecht, from which the Institute of Sonology was developed, housed the first electronic music studio in the Netherlands after the Philips laboratory in Eindhoven, which was not generally open to composers.
Yannis Kyriakides is a composer of contemporary classical music, and sound art. His music explores new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and highlighting the sensorial space of music. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media, particularly in the use of live electronics. The relation between music and language has been explored in many pieces that utilize text films as a multimedia element.
James Poke is a musician, primarily known as artistic director and co-founder of the ensemble Icebreaker.
This is the discography of the UK ensemble Icebreaker.
Klas Torstensson is a Swedish-Dutch composer.
Wim Franken was a Dutch composer, pianist and carillonneur.
Léon Orthel was a Dutch composer, pianist and teacher.
Gerard Beljon is a musician and composer from the Netherlands, specialising in chamber and choral music with contemporary resonances. His works have been performed in Austria, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Russia and the United States.