Kees van Baaren was a Dutch composer and teacher.

Van Baaren was born in Enschede

Enschede

Enschede , also known as Eanske in the local dialect of Twents, is a municipality and a city in the eastern Netherlands in the province of Overijssel and in the Twente region...

. His early studies (1924–29) were in Berlin with Rudolph Breithaupt (piano) and Friedrich Koch (composition) at the Stern conservatory

Stern conservatory

The Stern Conservatory was a private music school in Berlin with many notable tutors and alumni.-History:It was originally founded in 1850 as the Berliner Musikschule by Julius Stern, Theodor Kullak and Adolf Bernhard Marx. Kullak withdrew from the conservatory in 1855 in order to create a new...

. After returning to the Netherlands in 1929, he studied with Willem Pijper

Willem Pijper

Willem Pijper ; Zeist, 8 September 1894 - Utrecht, 18 March 1947) was a Dutch composer, music critic and music teacher.-Life:Pijper was born at Zeist, near Utrecht, on 8 September 1894 of strict Calvinist working-class parents. His father, who sometimes played psalm accompaniments on the harmonium,...

. He adopted Pijper's "germ cell technique" in his compositions from about 1934 onward. While composing some works in an accessible, tonal style, in other pieces he developed toward a serial

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

 technique, which emerged fully with the Septet for five winds, violin, and double bass (1952) (Ryker 2001). He was the first important Dutch composer to use twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...

.

In 1948 Van Baaren became director of the Conservatoire of the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum Society (later merged into the Conservatoire of Amsterdam). In 1953 he was appointed director of the Utrecht Conservatoire. In 1958 he became director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His students included many of the leading composers and performers of the next generation, including Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...

, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg

Misha Mengelberg

Misha Mengelberg is a Dutch jazz pianist and composer. He won the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1961.-Biography:...

, Peter Schat

Peter Schat

Peter Schat was a Dutch composer.Schat studied composition with Kees van Baaren at the conservatories in Utrecht and The Hague from 1952 until 1958, and then went on to study in London with Mátyás Seiber in 1959 and with Pierre Boulez in Basle in 1960–61...

, and Jan van Vlijmen (Ryker 2001). He died in Oegstgeest

Oegstgeest

Oegstgeest is a town and municipality in the province of South Holland in the western Netherlands. Its population was 22,576 in 2008.-Location :...

.

Selected works

• Concertino for piano and orchestra (1934)
• Sonatina in memoriam Willem Pijper, for piano (1948)
• The Hollow Men, cantata for soprano, baritone, mixed choir and orchestra, text by T. S. Eliot
  T. S. Eliot
  Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
  
  (1948, rev.1955-56)
• Septet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, and contrabass (1952)
• Symphony (1956)
• Variations for orchestra (1959)
• Music for Orchestra
• Partita for wind band (1961)
• String Quartet (1962)
• Wind Quintet (1963)
• Concerto for piano and orchestra (1964)

Sources

• Hill, Jackson. 1970. "The Music of Kees van Baaren: A Study of Transition in the Music of the Netherlands in the Second Third of the Twentieth Century". DMA diss. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
• Kien., Hein. 1976. ‘The Composer Kees van Baaren: Towards a Revaluation of Sound Material’, Key Notes 4:4–18
• Ryker, Harrison. 2001. "Baaren, Kees van". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Vermeulen, E. 1992. "Kees van Baaren's Antischool", Key Notes 26, no. 1:14–17.
• Wouters Jos. 1971. "Kees van Baaren". In Negen portretten van Nederlandse componisten, Dutch Composers' Gallery, 71–87. Amsterdam: Stichting Donemus.
• Wouters, Jos, and André Jurres (eds.) 1962. "Conversations with Dutch Composers: Kees van Baaren and Hans Henkemans". In Fifteen years Donemus, 1947–1962: Conversations with Dutch Composers / Gespräche mit niederländischen Komponisten, edited by Jos Wouters and André Jurres, translated by Ian F. Finlay (English) and Elisabeth Meter-Plaut (German), 50–59. Amsterdam: Stichting Donemus.