Board

Martijn Padding
Cornelis de Bondt
Peter-Jan Wagemans
Alison Isadora
Christina Viola Oorebeek
Sander Germanus

Martijn Padding (Amsterdam, 1956) studied piano and musicology at the University of Utrecht, and composition with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
His oeuvre ranges from solo instrumental works to large-scale orchestral compositions and music theatre. His more recent works are less prone to the angular construction and pithy harmonic structure of his earlier pieces, and although Padding's music often still exhibits a technical-musical aspect, a theatrical element is increasingly evident and sound is becoming more important.
Padding's compositional aesthetic precludes any hierarchical relationship amongst, for instance, modernistic elements, influences from popular culture and historical-based doctrines. His compositions, accordingly, treat a broad spectrum of subjects and personages.
His compositions are often the result of a close working relationship with the musicians themselves. Padding's collaboration, since 1998, with pianist Gerard Bouwhuis and the avant-garde quintet Ensemble LOOS has resulted in a number of works (The man on the mountain, Speculum Inversum, Loneny Moose), both with and without electronics. The ensemble played the premiere of the opera TATTOOED TONGUES, to a libretto by Friso Haverkamp, at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2001 (2003, St Petersburg). Last year Padding's piano concerto Unequal Parts was premiered by Gerard Bouwhuis and the Asko ensemble.
Padding's works are performed by many prominent ensembles, soloists and orchestras in the Netherlands and abroad. Martijn Padding is a member of the composition faculty at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.

Cornelis de Bondt, born on December 9th 1953 in The Hague, studied at the Royal Conservatory in that same city. He followed lessons in music theory with Hein Kien, Ineke Kien-Vermaas and Diderik Wagenaar and studied composition under, among others, Jan van Vlijmen and Louis Andriessen.
In 1984 he concluded his studies and was awarded the prize for composition.
Since 1988 he has been employed by the Royal Conservatory as a teacher of music theory.
´(...) It has become absolutely necessary to dispel a misunderstanding full of ambiguity and contradiction; it is time to neutralize the failure. Hollow rhetoric nor hypocritical overestimation of oneself belong to this adjustment, but rather precisely a type of severity that is free of weakness, and uncompromising. Let us readily write it down, without the slightest pursuit of a disgraceful scandal, without shameful hypocrisy or unnecessary melancholy: Beethoven is deaf.´ Cornelis de Bondt

Peter-Jan Wagemans was born on September 7, 1952 in The Hague. He studied organ (graduation 1974), composition (graduation 1975) and music theory (graduation 1977) at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. There he was also introduced to the field of electronic music. He was awarded the conservatory prize for composition, and subsequently he studied for some time with Klaus Huber in Freiburg.
From 1978 to 1986 Wagemans was teaching music theory at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague and since 1984 he teaches composition at the Conservatory of Music in Rotterdam. From 1990 till 2002 he was artistic manager of the Doelen Ensemble. From 1998 till 2006 he was programmer for the Noordhollands Philharmonisch Orkest (now Holland Symfonia).
Several compositions for orchestra were first performed by Ernest Bour conducting the Residentie Orkest (Overture, 1972; Muziek I, 1974) and the Südwestfunk Orchester (Muziek II, 1979). Riccardo Chailly conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the first performance of De stad en de engel (1996, rev. 1997). The Brabant Orkest devoted two concerts to Peter-Jan Wagemans in a 'composer's portrait' in 1997 with the premiere of Nachtvlucht (1997, for soprano and orchestra). At the occasion of his 50th birthday the composition Moloch (2000) was performed at the Rotterdam Music Festival 2002. Wagemans wrote compositions for important Dutch chamber music ensembles such as Schönberg Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, Doelen Quartet and the Japanse pianist Tomoko Mukaijama.
Wagemans received the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize 1990 and 2003 of the City of Amsterdam for Rosebud and Moloch. In 1999 he was awarded the ANV-Visser-Neerlandia Muziekprijs.

Alison Isadora (Wallace) was born and bred in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 1962.
She began her violin studies according to the Suzuki-method. She studied political philosophy and music (violin with Gavin Saunders, composition with Jack Body, gamelan with Alan Thomas) at the Victoria University of Wellington. In 1986 she came to The Netherlands and studied violin with Vera Beths at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. From 1989 till 1994 she studied composition with Theo Loevendie, Klaas de Vries and Gilius van Bergeijk. She followed courses at Gaudeamus (1990) and STEIM (Women artists on technology, 1991). From 2000 till 2003 she studied theatre at DasArts.
Isadora wrote compositions for numerous Dutch ensembles, such as the Nieuw Ensemble, (Sgraffitio) and the Maarten Altena Ensemble (The fire within). In the last years she has become increasingly interested in the possibilities of connecting music to other disdiplines, and in the ways realtime electronics can assist this process. Her first foray into this arena in 1995 was the music-theatre work Hoofdwas, for midi-controlled washing-machine, live electronics and mezzo-soprano which she created together with Jan Bas Bollen (with whom she forms the duo SYNC). Since 2002 Isadora has been working on a series of pieces concerned with issues of cultural identity. In 2003 the work Speaking Rites was premiered during the Gaudeamus Music Week - an installation and audio walk in which interviews with Dutch citizens from various cultural extraction were presented in interactive environment. Her latest work is an installation connecting Chinese goldminers in 19th century New Zealand with current day Chinese dealing with e-waste sent by the west.

Christina Viola Oorebeek is an American-Dutch citizen. She immersed herself in music as a profession at 21, teaching herself as much as possible about jazz and blues, studied Indian music at the school of Ravi Shankar in Los Angeles, and sang in a rock band in San Francisco.
She studied piano with Willem Brons at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, and commenced on her composing career at age 50, studying composition at the Rotterdam Conservatory with Klaas de Vries and Peter-Jan Wagemans. She was granted the Composition Prize upon graduation in 1999.
Her work has been performed in Barcelona, the Music Factory Festival in Norway, the Feniks Festival in Antwerp, the ISCM WMD in Yokohama, South Africa, Italy, France, the United States, and in the Netherlands in the Gaudeamus Music Theatre Festival, the “Live” festival for electro-acoustic music, the Concertgebouw, and many other venues.
She has had commissions from, among others, Nieuw Ensemble, Ivo Janssen, Doelenensemble, Insomnio, Calefax, the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet and won prizes in the  Dutilleux Concours  (1999 ) and the Gaudeamus Young Composers Workshop (1997).
Her interest in electro-acoustic music has been supported by 3 residencies at STEIM in Amsterdam. These experiences have formed a pluriform pool of musical influences and experiences. The composer´s ideal is to exist in a continual state of (re)discovery and invention.

Sander Germanus was born on March 16, 1972 in Amsterdam. He graduated as a solo saxophone performer with distinction in 1995, having studied classical saxophone with Ed Bogaard at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He studied composition with Peter-Jan Wagemans and instrumentation with Klaas de Vries at the Rotterdam Conservatory, where he graduated with distinction in 1998. He has also studied composition with Luc Van Hove at the Royal Music Conservatory in Antwerp. In 1999 he was admitted to the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, where he wrote a thesis on microtonality and graduated in 2005 with the laureate degree. From 2001 to 2002 he worked at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg.
He participated in masterclasses and seminars by Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann and others. Germanus has written works for Nieuw Ensemble, Il Solisti del Vento, Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, Calefax reedquintet, Doelen Ensemble, Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest and Residentie Orkest, among others. Since 1999 he has concentrated on composing quartertone music; his latest quartertone works were performed by the Russian Ensemble Studio for New Music and the Belgian/French Quatuor Danel. In Lunapark (2006) his quartertone theory perfectly converged with his musical developments in tempo and rhythm. He is currently working on a new piece for the Asko Ensemble, entitled Piccadilly Circus. Since 2007 Germanus is the director of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation, centre of microtonal music, located in the Muziekgebouw aan ´t IJ in Amsterdam.