A century of new music: Ruyneman and De Leeuw

This month, Reinbert de Leeuw celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday. Not only do television, radio, internet media and written press devote extensive attention to the no small achievements of this champion of contemporary music, but he is also being honoured with his own festival, 'Reinbert 75'. This will be organised by the Asko|Schönberg, which he co-founded, the Residentie Orkest and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he took up teaching fifty years ago. In the same year, the composer and pianist died Daniel Ruyneman (1886-1963), who worked equally tirelessly to promote the very latest notes.

Like Reinbert de Leeuw, Daniël Ruyneman decided to devote his life to music relatively late. De Leeuw studied Dutch for two years and did not start studying piano at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum until he was 20. Ruyneman started his career as a sailor, then worked for the French Office of the Dutch Railways, but decided to start studying piano at eighteen, initially as a self-taught musician. Becoming increasingly captivated by composition, Ruyneman went on to study composition at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1913.

Just as De Leeuw opposed the conservative programming of concert halls and orchestras after the Second World War, Ruyneman championed experimental music after the First World War. As early as 1918, he shocked audiences with two radical compositions, The Call for mixed choir and Hieroglyphs for ensemble. The choral piece bears the subtitle 'colour range for mixed voices', and consists only of sung vocals and consonants, something unprecedented in our country. Hieroglyphs was written for three flutes, celesta, harp, piano, cubpells, two mandolins and two guitars. This exceptional scoring is still extremely modern a century after the fact.

In 1918, Ruyneman also initiated the Dutch Society for the Development of Modern Creative Music. Its aim is to make the work of Dutch composers 'of the most progressive direction' known at home and abroad. Initial members include Sem Dresden and Alexander Voormolen, and later Willem Pijper joins. Concerts featuring the very latest chamber music were organised in various cities, and in 1924 the Society merged with the newly formed Holland Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM).

Ruyneman hereafter moves to Groningen, at that time a centre of modernity, and joins the artist group The Plough. Together with the student music company Bragi, he provides the first scenic performance in the Netherlands in 1925 of Le Boeuf sur le Toit by Darius Milhaud. In his eternal endeavour 'to perform those works that are in essential connection with the times in which we live', he founded the Dutch Society for Contemporary Music in 1930. He would continue to lead it for over 30 years and managed to attract such luminaries as Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen and Igor Stravinsky to our country for this purpose.

From 1952, Ruyneman also organised concerts in the auditorium of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and thanks to this series, fourteen years later, Reinbert de Leeuw would break through as pianist and programmer. Before the interval he will play groundbreaking pieces by Franz Liszt, Alexander Skrjabin and Charles Ives, after the interval he will place his own Music for Piano alongside works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur.

Ruyneman will have been dead for three years, but this stimulating programming is entirely in keeping with his aims. It will prove a constant in the career of De Leeuw, who, like his predecessor, remains tirelessly committed to cutting-edge music even in old age. For his efforts, De Leeuw was recently awarded both the Amsterdam Prize and the Theo Bruinsprijs. The latter will be awarded during the 'Reinbert 75' festival.

On 9-9-2013, Reinbert de Leeuw received an Edison for his recording of Via crucis by Franz Liszt at Et'cetera records. I wrote the CD booklet.

On 14 March 2014, my biography was published Reinbert de Leeuw: man or melody, in which you will read more about Ruyneman.

On Wednesday 1 April 2015, I turned Hieroglyphics in my programme Panorama the Lion on the Concertzender.