Education and influences

Rijnvos studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague

Royal Conservatory of The Hague

The Royal Conservatory of The Hague is a conservatorium of music, providing higher education in music and dance, it is located in The Hague, Netherlands.-The Conservatory:...

 with Jan van Vlijmen and Brian Ferneyhough

Brian Ferneyhough

Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...

.
He received a DAAD

German Academic Exchange Service

The German Academic Exchange Service or DAAD is the largest German support organisation in the field of international academic co-operation....

 scholarship and attended a postgraduate course at the Musikhochschule

Hochschule für Musik Freiburg

The Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Freiburg is a public music academy subsidized by the State of Baden-Württemberg for academic research and artistic and pedagogical training in music.-History:The Hochschule was initially founded as a municipal institution in 1946 under the direction of Gustav...

 in Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the extreme south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg. Historically, the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain...

.
In 1994 he took part in the International Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers at Bretton Hall

Bretton Hall

Bretton Hall is a country house in West Bretton near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England. It housed Bretton Hall College and was a campus of the University of Leeds...

 (Wakefield

Wakefield

Wakefield is the main settlement and administrative centre of the City of Wakefield, a metropolitan district of West Yorkshire, England. Located by the River Calder on the eastern edge of the Pennines, the urban area is and had a population of 76,886 in 2001....

, UK).

Contacts with Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...

 and John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

 between 1986-1992 were a major influence on his development.
Rijnvos has also been influenced by the works of artists outside of music such as William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

, Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...

 and Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

.

Compositions

Rijnvos has written for solo instrumentalists, small ensembles, symphony and chamber orchestra.

He has written several cycles, such as Block Beuys (1995–2000), based on the collection of works by Joseph Beuys in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

, and the prize-winning three-part NYConcerto (2004–2006).

Commissioned by the Netherlands Radio 4

Radio 4 (Netherlands)

Radio 4 is an NPO public-service radio network in the Netherlands. It chiefly broadcasts classical music.Radio 4 began transmissions on 28 December 1975 under the name Hilversum 4. Its first programme was produced by the Veronica broadcasting association...

, he wrote Riflesso sull'acqua for cor anglais and orchestra, premiered in 2008.

Richard Rijnvos has received commissions from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is a symphony orchestra of the Netherlands, based at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In 1988, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands conferred the "Royal" title upon the orchestra...

 and Ensemble Intercontemporain

Ensemble InterContemporain

The Ensemble InterContemporain is a French chamber orchestra, based in Paris at the Cité de la musique and IRCAM, which specialises in contemporary classical music....

.

In 2008, he was a featured composer at November Music, Holland's annual contemporary music festival.

Awards

In 2000 Rijnvos was awarded the Matthijs Vermeulen Award

Matthijs Vermeulen Award

The Matthijs Vermeulen Award is a Dutch composition prize. It was named after the Dutch composer Matthijs Vermeulen .During the years 1972 through 2004, the prize was awarded annually by the Amsterdam Foundation for the Arts...

 for Times Square Dance.

In August 2008 he was awarded the Buma Toonzetters Prize for NYConcerto.

Other activities

In October 2009 Rijnvos was appointed Head of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Durham.
He is also chairman of the Union of Composers in the Netherlands, and artistic advisor of the Ives Ensemble, of which he was managing director between 1991 and 2000.

External links

• Composer's website
• Composer in the Spotlight: Richard Rijnvos, Netherlands Music Centre