Description: The official website of composer Richard Rijnvos
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photo & webdesign by Frank Zweers
The descriptive titles of his works, which often refer to cities or other locations, do not immediately reveal that Richard Rijnvos (NL, 1964) is first and foremost a radical composer. Someone who generates tones from non-musical, numerical sources such as magic squares and chessboards — and who loves to endlessly stack melodic lines on top of each other. This rigorous, dispassionate approach produces sensual works that bear a unique signature that is not specifically Dutch.
Rijnvos says that he is not concerned too much with modern music, and that he prefers to listen to masters of previous centuries. Beethoven, Janáček, and Sibelius are some of his favourite composers. Still, the discrepancy between the way these romantics worked and his own modus operandi could not be greater. As he himself says, “The traditional notion of a composer is someone who conceives a musical idea in his head and wants to commit that to paper. I do not envision anything in my head, yet I want to cre