My work

Composing for me is an intriguing activity. The building of the piece itself goes quite easy, but then comes the real work to make it sound the way I have it in my head. The music that I hear is sometimes richer and bigger or more subtle than I'm able to express. Sometimes I feel quite confined by my skills and means. But I gladly accept this challenge, because of the joy it brings me.

I see and feel music as moving structures with form, color and meaning. As allegorical symbols that speak to me. They have beauty and essence that cannot be expressed in words. Music is a subtle matter that responds to mathematical laws. Maybe a matter that precedes our thoughts. Music, harmony, it is this great mystery that I want to share with my listeners.
I tried to write about this in an article for the magazine FrontieR: In the beginning there was…. Music!

Chopin and the fairy music of Grieg and Moussorgsky, with whom I grew up, I always liked very much. Beethoven and Rachmaninov, but also the complicated symphonic rock of Pink Floyd, Yes or King Krimson have probably influenced me. The earth, nature with its mountains waters, skies, the awesome universe, a poem, a thought, everything can inspire me.

Sometimes other artists ask me to compose something, and that was often film music or vocal music.

After school I studied singing at the conservatoire and musicology at the University of Amsterdam, but I didn't finish these studies. I did become a schoolteacher. I went to Paris, where during 15 years I sold handmade luxury articles from my atelier to an international, mainly Arabic clientele. There my two beautiful sons were born. I had only time to study music from the books and I read Plato, Kepler and other esoteric thinkers. My vocation for music revealed itself in 1995 when I came back in Holland. As I composed little pieces on my piano I heard all the time an orchestra in my head. At last, encouraged by very loving help, I took the step to write for an orchestral ensemble myself. And since I can't put them in a closet and wait for the orchestra to come by, I execute them on synthesizers. I took lessons for the technical engineering of my work.

Besides composing I make music with elderly people, which I love to do, see on www.divertimentomuziek.nl