Daniel Ruyneman
Daniel Ruyneman (born Daniël Ruijneman; 8 August 1886 – 25 July 1963) was a Dutch composer and a prominent advocate of experimental music during the interwar period and afterwards. Born and died in Amsterdam, he played the piano and wrote primarily in the classical tradition.
The son of a railway employee, Ruyneman took piano lessons as a child but developed a serious interest in music only later. At eighteen he joined the merchant navy and travelled to the Dutch East Indies, experiences he later associated with the beginning of his interest in Eastern music. Encouraged by Julius Röntgen and Alphons Diepenbrock, he studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory from 1913 to 1916, including with Bernard Zweers.
In 1918 he helped found the Dutch Association for the Development of Modern Creative Music with Sem Dresden, Henri Zagwijn, Bernhard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer, Alexander Voormolen and, later, Willem Pijper. The association became the Netherlands section of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1924; Ruyneman was its driving force and served on its board after the Second World War. After settling in Groningen in 1920, he worked as music editor of Hendrik Werkman's Blad voor Kunst, led the Groningen student music society Bragi, and gave the Dutch premiere of Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau's ballet-pantomime Le Boeuf sur le toit in 1925. He also staged works by Debussy with the painter Johan Dijkstra.
Back in Amsterdam in the early 1930s, Ruyneman founded the Dutch Association for Contemporary Music, which promoted performances of modern music and published a journal that he edited. The journal ceased in 1941, but he continued the association's other work for the rest of his life. In concert series at the Stedelijk Museum during the 1950s, he promoted contemporary music by Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Dutch composers.
His early music was influenced by late Romanticism, as in his Second Violin Sonata, but he soon rejected that style. A 1914 meeting with Debussy, who commented critically on his compositions, may have shaped this change. Debussy's influence can be heard in The Call for wordless choir and in Hieroglyphs, a 1918 chamber work scored for three flutes, celesta, harp, piano, two mandolins, two guitars and the electrophoon, an instrument designed by Ruyneman that could be replaced by vibraphone. The Call and the later Sonata for Choral Singing of 1931 developed an unaccompanied, instrumental approach to choral writing.
Ruyneman corresponded with Alban Berg and Anton Webern and remained in contact with Darius Milhaud and Egon Wellesz. His later work drew eclectically on changing musical currents: neoclassical elements appeared in the 1920s, Romantic expression returned in works such as the Violin Concerto during the 1930s, and after the Second World War he studied serialism before moving away from it shortly before his death. He continued to seek unusual sound combinations, using the electrophoon in Hieroglyphs and the 1929 Symphonie Brève; the instrument was lost in Rotterdam in 1940. His research into Javanese folk music also informed his work.
His selected compositions include the opera The Brothers Karamazov, the Concerto per orchestra, Symphony 1953, three violin sonatas, chamber music, choral works and songs. He completed and orchestrated Modest Mussorgsky's unfinished opera Le Mariage in 1930. Some works were published under the name Danny Ruyneman. He married the mezzo-soprano Dina Becht in 1918; after their divorce in 1929, he married Maatje Martina Marinissen. Neither marriage produced children.