Born in Haarlem, Sept 17, 1892
Died in Haarlem, April 12, 19811
[HEN-drik an-DREE-sen / Dutch Pronunciation]
Biography from Donemus publishing house
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ANDRIESSEN, Hendrik
Nationality: Dutch
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BOSMANS, Henriëtte
Born in Amsterdam, 6 Dec, 1895
Died in Amsterdam, 2 Jul, 1952
- Henriëtte Bosmans [PRONUNCIATION] was the only child of musician parents. Her father was the principal cellist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and her mother was a piano teacher.
- Having studied both piano and composition, Bosmans began performing as a professional concert pianist at 19 years old. Throughout the 1920s, she toured across Europe while also composing.
- Following the Nazi occupation during WWII, Bosmans was forced to stop performing publicly due to her Jewish heritage (her mother was Jewish), thereby severely damaging her professional career. That didn’t stop her from organizing underground concerts.
- In a terrifying turn of events, Bosmans’s (now elderly) mother was arrested and deported to a camp. However, through her own advocacy and the help of highly regarded acquaintances, Bosmans was able to use her professional status to keep her mother alive through the war.
- Following the war, Bosmans experienced a creative renaissance and wrote many new compositions. Sadly, not long after, her health began to deteriorate. She died in 1952 from stomach cancer.
- As a composer, many of Bosmans’s best-known compositions were inspired by her romantic relationships with both men and women, including cellist Frieda Belinfante, violinist Francis Koene, and soprano Noémie Pérugia.23
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CLEMENS NON PAPA, Jacobus
Born in c1510–15
Died in 1555/6
- Jacobus Clemens non Papa (also called Jacob Clement) was one of the most prolific musical figures of the early 16th century. He is best remembered today for his polyphonic settings of the psalms in Dutch called the Souterliedekens.
- Musicologists know little-to-nothing about the early life of the composer. The first public record of Clemens is in the late 1530s with the publication of several chansons.
- *Regarding the “non Papa” distinction in the composer’s name – there’s a theory that the suffix was meant to be a joke as a play on the similarly-named Pope Clement VII, i.e., Jacob Clemens… not the pope ;).
- One of the unique features of Clemens’s music is the fact that it is largely melody-driven rather than led by counterpoint (as was the standard of the time).
- Clemens’s surviving 500ish manuscripts include 15 masses, two mass fragments, ~233 motets, two cycles of Magnificat settings, 159 souterliedekens and lofzangen, and just over 100 secular works.4
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DIEPENBROCK, Alphons
Born in Amsterdam, Sept 2, 1862
Died in Amsterdam, April 5, 1921
- Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock was a skilled musician from an early age, particularly proficient in piano, organ, and violin. Though he longed for a career as a composer and conductor, his family convinced him to study classical languages instead.
- Diepenbrock began his professional career as a classics teacher while studying composition on the side. Fun fact – he received no formal training in composition and instead taught himself through extensive study of composers he admired, such as Wagner.
- Around 1895, Diepenbrock decided to devote himself to music, though he still supported himself by teaching Latin and Greek and cultural writing articles. He finally gained notoriety as a composer around the turn of the century, gaining the recognition (and consequent friendship) of Gustav Mahler.
- As a composer, Diepenbrock’s musical voice incorporated 16th-century polyphony and Wagnerian chromaticism. After extensive study of Debussy’s works in the last decade of his life, his musical style shifted to include impressionism.
- “Diepenbrock’s music is passionate and sensitive, without falling into the excesses of late Romanticism.”
- Diepenbrock was largely inspired by poetry; consequently, the bulk of his compositional oeuvre is vocal music.5
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Biography from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
Short biography from the Kennedy Center
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SUSATO, Tielmann
