page_title: Rudi Martinus van Dijk
section_title: Childhood and early musical career (1938-1955)
hierarchical_section_title: Rudi Martinus van Dijk / Biography / Childhood and early musical career (1938-1955)
caption_attribution_description: English: Rudi Martinus van Dijk in 1949.
context_page_description: Rudi Martinus van Dijk was a Dutch and Canadian composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music.
  In all Van Dijk's music, whichever of his stylistic trends it seems immediately to favour, the voice of a highly original creator is to be heard. Sources, as Béla Bartók noted, are much less important in framing a composer's achievement than the use he makes of them. The discriminating ear that makes Van Dijk's orchestral music at once beguiling and immediately recognisable as a personal expression is also to be discerned on the smaller sound-scale of his chamber compositions. And one of Van Dijk's most notable characteristics - a purposeful firmness of the bass line - imbues his music in all genres with an unfailing sense of logical and expressive direction, even in the context of a highly inflected harmonic chromaticism. It would be a bold annotator who ventured to pin Van Dijk's artistic origins down to one or other national or stylistic source.
context_section_description: Van Dijk's musical background began on the piano at the age of six. In 1944, he took up preparatory piano studies with Corrie Vierdag  at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. From the age of 18, Van Dijk continued as a full-time student at the conservatory studying piano with Leon Orthel, oboe with Jaap Stotijn, and composition and analysis with Hendrik Andriessen. Van Dijk came to the fore as a composer when his Sonatina for piano was chosen and performed at the International Gaudeamus Music week in 1953. Later that year, he was engaged by the Canadian Army to join the Canadian Grenadier Guards Band as an oboist. He married Jeanne Koning and they moved to Ontario, Canada. As a bandsman, he also became a pupil (summer of 1955) of the American composer Roy Harris.
caption: Rudi Martinus van Dijk in 1949
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