Cor Kee
Cor Kee, full name Cornelis Kee, was a Dutch organist and composer. He was born in Zaandam on 24 November 1900 and died there on 3 January 1997. He was the son of the barber Pieter Kee and Grietje Husslage. He married the occasional singer Wilhelmina Sibbelina Spits, and their son Piet Kee also became an organist.
Kee studied with Jan Zwart, except during 1917–1918, when he attended a course at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Jean-Baptiste de Pauw as his principal organ teacher. He later took composition lessons with Sem Dresden. He also studied singing with Thom Denijs for a long period and appeared as a bass singer in several concert halls, but ultimately chose the organ as his profession.
From 1915, Kee played the organ at the Mennonite Church in Westzaan. He served as organist of the Mennonite Singel Church in Amsterdam from 1922 to 1924, then moved to the Round Lutheran Church. When that church was closed for worship in January 1935, he began playing at the Old Lutheran Church on the Spui. In 1964 he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as organist of the Lutheran congregation.
As a composer, Kee became known through his three collections Psalms for Organ, the more avant-garde 50 Psalm Arrangements, Series Changes in Four Sections, and Phases for Organ. His 1975 composition Amsterdam, 700 Years of Pleasure Garden, marking Amsterdam’s seven-hundredth anniversary, was published in the composer’s manuscript.
His compositional career is divided into stylistic periods. In the first, partly written under the pseudonym Orgelius, he composed in a late-Romantic homophonic style, as in his Toccata Psalm 33. He subsequently adopted a more modern idiom influenced by Paul Hindemith, from which Psalms for Organ emerged. A neo-Baroque period followed, including Preludes and Fugues, although he sought an individual voice within that style. Later, he wrote free compositions based on church melodies, sometimes using serial music, as well as modern techniques including clusters and aleatory methods. Despite his published compositions, he was also a master improviser.
Kee was for many years principal organ teacher at the Utrecht Conservatory and a permanent improvisation teacher at the international summer academy in Haarlem. He also regularly worked as a guest teacher at courses abroad and served on competition juries. His improvisation students came from throughout Europe, and several later won first prizes at the International Organ Improvisation Competition in Haarlem and the National Organ Improvisation Competition in Bolsward. He was frequently heard on radio, and his hundredth broadcast appearance was reportedly already in 1939.
He was appointed a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau.