Willem Pijper
Willem Pijper, whose full name was Willem Frederik Johannes Pijper, was a Dutch composer and writer on music. Born in Zeist on 8 September 1894, he became one of the leading Dutch composers of the first half of the twentieth century.
Pijper studied music theory at the Toonkunst Music School in Utrecht, later the Utrecht Conservatory, completing his examination in 1915. He studied composition with Johan Wagenaar and piano with Helena Johanna van Lunteren-Hansen. The Concertgebouw Orchestra was already performing his music by 1918.
To support himself, Pijper wrote music criticism and essays for newspapers and periodicals. He began as a critic at the Utrecht Daily Newspaper in 1917 and also taught composition at the Amsterdam Music Lyceum. In 1925 he became principal lecturer in instrumentation at the Amsterdam Conservatory. With Paul F. Sanders, he founded the journal De Muziek in 1926. From 1930 until his death, he directed the Rotterdam Conservatory, where his pupils included Henk Badings, Bertus van Lier, Henriette Bosmans, Oscar van Hemel, Guillaume Landre, Hans Henkemans, Kees van Baaren, Rudolf Escher and Jan van Dijk. During the later 1930s he also wrote about music for De Groene Amsterdammer.
His early music reflected German late Romanticism, particularly Gustav Mahler, as heard in his First Symphony of 1917. He soon turned towards the French impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. After 1920 he sought an absolute music free of literary references, drawing especially on Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok. He employed polytonality and polyrhythm, and developed a compositional method he called “germ-cell technique,” in which motifs are set against a largely unchanging tonal centre. His music also shows a preference for Spanish rhythms such as the tango and habanera.
From about 1932, Pijper's style became more restrained and transparent. He wrote the operas Halewijn and the unfinished Merlin, as well as three symphonies, concertos for piano, cello and violin, five string quartets, two piano trios, chamber works, piano music, vocal music and incidental music. His Masonic works include Six Adagios for string orchestra, written in 1940. Although he followed a path distinct from the atonality and twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School, he made an important contribution to the development of modern music in the Netherlands.
Shortly before the German attack on the Netherlands in 1940, Pijper placed much of his music in a bank vault; the manuscripts he had kept at home were destroyed in the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940. He was an honorary member of the International Association of Chamber Music. Pijper died of lung cancer in Leidschendam on 18 March 1947, aged 52, and was buried at Zorgvlied Cemetery. A bronze statue of him by Willem Verbon stands on the Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam.