‘At a young age I accidentally received a faraway Arabic station on my radio. My reaction was acute: I became intensely aware that there are other people on the world who live, think and feel in entirely different terms. Ever since I have been interested in what this means for music and why.’ This frequently quoted account by Ton de Leeuw touches the essence of one of the most individual and internationally appreciated oeuvres of Dutch 20th-century music. In 2010 Music Centre the Netherlands will bring out two volumes containing the complete piano solo works by de Leeuw, which come with CDs by pianist René Eckhardt. For some of de Leeuw’s compositions this will be the first time they are published, other compositions will be published again in a modern, critical edition.

De Leeuw studied composition with Louis Toebosch and Henk Badings. In 1949-1950 he attended Messiaen’s famous analysis course in Paris. Here he discovered the music by Webern and serialism, the influence of which can clearly be seen in his compositions from that time. As he was greatly interested in non-Western music, he went on to study ethnomusicology for four years with gamelan specialist Jaap Kunst in Amsterdam. With this period of intensive contact with music from unknown worlds he rounded off the range of his musical interests; from here he would find his own way in the Dutch and international music world.

Contrary to what most people think, de Leeuw visited India, the country whose music and culture strongly influenced him, only once. This was in 1961 when he made a study trip, commissioned and financed by the Dutch government, in order to research the classical music tradition on location and to investigate a possible interchange between Indian and Western music. Later he made several study trips to Asiatic countries such as Indonesia and Japan. This direct contact with Eastern music cultures reinforced certain elements in De Leeuw’s aesthetics that were derived from them, such as cyclic forms, the almost complete absence of stark contrasts, the tendency to counterbalance opposites based on the idea of fundamental unity, and the prevalence of a balanced ‘being’ of the music over the expression of individual voices.