Rob du Bois

Rob du Bois (28 May 1934 – 28 August 2013) was a Dutch composer, pianist, and jurist.

Rob (Robert Louis) du Bois was born in Amsterdam.

His French ancestry can be seen from his name, and he maintained a sympathy for the French mentality and language.

After graduating from the Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam he studied law at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit in the same city.

He began studying music with Chris Rabé at the Volksmuziekschool, later taking piano lessons, initially with Hans Sachs, and later with T. Hart Nibbrig–de Graeff.

He decided to become a composer after hearing two symphonies by Matthijs Vermeulen in 1949.

As a composer he was self-taught, with influences especially from his contact during the 1950s with the composers Kees van Baaren and Daniel Ruyneman.

Muziek is clearly influenced by Berio’s flute Sequenza (1958), but also by the supple lyricism found in Boulez's Le marteau sans maître.

This piece, based on successive transformations of a twelve-tone row, requires a level of skill that was unprecedented at the time: it employs the full chromatic range of the instrument, featuring extremes of range, rapid, difficult fingerings in complex rhythms, large dynamic changes and a modest range of extended techniques: fluttertonguing, glissando, and finger vibrato.

In 1959, Bois became associated with the group of composers formed around the Gaudeamus Foundation, of which he later became a board member.

In the late 1960s, Bois became a performing member of the ICP (Instant Composers Pool), which had been founded in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and drummer Han Bennink.

Initially received even by professional players with dismay over its "unjustifiably" tricky rhythms, as well as its "unintelligible" formal design, Muziek has come to be regarded as one of the best avant-garde works of the 1960s for the instrument, and is considered a central work in the recorder’s 20th-century repertoire, whose technical extravagances have become "a necessary part of the training of every conservatory student".

Between 1960 and 1969 Bois composed a series of seven Pastorales for various instrumental combinations.

Bois has shown a special interest in composing for the recorder, an instrument with which he became acquainted initially from the Dutch virtuoso Frans Brüggen, for whom he wrote his first recorder piece, Muziek voor altblokfluit, in 1961.

The two wind quintets (Chants en contrepoints from 1962 and Réflexions sur le jour où Pérotin le Grand ressuscitera from 1969) were both writ -ten for the Danzi Quintet, and Bois also wrote solo pieces for some of the members of this well-known ensemble: flutist Frans Vester (Muziek for solo flute, 1961), oboist Koen van Slogteren (Beams, for oboe and piano, 1979), and clarinetist Piet Honingh (Vertiges, 1987).

When the German recorder player Michael Vetter came to Holland looking for composers to write new works for him, he introduced du Bois and his colleagues Louis Andriessen and Will Eisma to many new techniques, which du Bois explored in Spiel und Zwischenspiel for recorder and piano (1962), a work quite unlike anything previously written for recorder, which employs very high notes, harmonics, multiphonics, white noise, glissandos, and what Vetter calls "differentiated vibration techniques".

He first became known outside of Holland as a composer when his music was performed at the Zagreb Biennale and the Warsaw Autumn, in both 1967 and 1969, and at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1967 in Prague.

It was for Breuker that du Bois composed the Breuker Concerto in 1967, a work for two clarinets, four saxophones, and 21 strings, which was premiered by Breuker with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

For example, his Concerto pour Hrisanide (1968–71) was composed for the Romanian composer, improviser, and piano virtuoso Alexandru Hrisanide.

It quotes from Hrisanide’s own compositions, and requires the soloist to play not only piano, but an electronic organ, a toy piano, and a large tom-tom.

Du Bois played keyboards in a number of ICP projects, including Breuker’s grandiose February 1969 “happening”, Mozart Opera, which also featured Derek Bailey on guitar, Paul Rutherford and Willem van Manen on trombones, and Han Bennink on drums.

A number of Bois’s more militant colleagues began staging public protests, the most widely reported being the Nutcracker Action on 17 November 1969 when demonstrators disrupted a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose activities they claimed were “maintaining an undemocratic artistic environment”.

Many of the demonstrators, such as Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, and Peter Schat were Bois’s close friends and, a month or two after the Nutcracker Action, Bois led—together with Konrad Boehmer and Sytze Smit—working groups mobilised under the general leadership of Mengelberg in support of "a radical and democratic renewal of musical life".

Some of these were released on LP in the early 1970s, and some others more recently on a CD on Breuker’s BVHaast label.

For Dutch composers of Bois's generation, the search for a politically and socially engaged music has been of paramount importance.

Although he never composed an opera, Bois’s output includes two extended music-theatre works: the ballet Midas (1970), and Vandaag is het morgen van gisteren: (helaas geen sprookje) (1975), an hour-long extravaganza for soloists, children’s choir, orchestra and brass band.

Bois's other larger-scale works include a Chamber Symphony for 13 winds, a Violin Concerto, a Concerto for Two Violins, and two Piano Concertos.

The greatest part of his compositional output, however, consists of chamber music for a wide variety of ensembles, including four string quartets, two wind quintets, and a concerted work for solo double bass with double wind quintet.

Bois created a number of other works especially for Sparnaay: Chemin for solo bass clarinet (1971), Fusion voor deux for bass clarinet and piano, and Iguanodon (1982), for six bass clarinets and three contrabass clarinets.

Many of Bois’s other compositions have also been written for friends and colleagues.

In 1972, du Bois alternated with Louis Andriessen in the ensemble that accompanied viola soloist Lodewijk de Boer in performances of Breuker's Speelplan for viola, seven instruments, and live electronics, the latter performed by Michel Waisvisz Bois also participated in recordings of Breuker’s music—mostly incidental music for various theatre productions—by the ICP and other groups between 1968 and 1977.

In May 1972, Bois's music was performed by Willem Breuker and Louis Andriessen’s Orkest de Volharding, which had been formed in the wake of the 1969 anti-establishment Nutcracker Action with the object of taking contemporary music out of the concert halls and bringing it directly to ordinary people who never frequent such places.

Bois also composed pieces for two other Romanian musicians: the clarinetist Sonia Dumitrescu, for whom he composed Une danse pour Sonia (1973), and the viola player Vladimir Mendelssohn, for whom he wrote the Sonata for solo viola (1981) and Vladimir's Hyde-Away for viola and piano.

In 1976, the ensemble ICÉ from Hilversum, led by Will Eisma, with bass-clarinet soloist Harry Sparnaay, took Bois's composition Heliotrope (for a soloist and an optional number of accompanists, 1967) to the Wittinger Tage für neue Kammermusik, where Sparnaay created a sensation (Diederichs-Lafite 1976, 383).

Du Bois's Springtime for ten winds and piano (1978) was composed for de Volharding.

The 1980 Sonata for violin and piano is also dedicated to Hrisanide, along with the Hungarian violinist György Hamza (who is also the dedicatee of the Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra).

Allegro (1987) and Gaberbocchus (1996) - the latter named after the Gaberbocchus Press of Stefan Themerson, with each movement given the title of one of his novels - both for the unusual combination of four pianos, were composed for Maarten Bon's Amsterdam Piano Quartet, founded in 1983.

Many years earlier, Bon and Bois had both studied piano with Hans Sachs at the same time.

In 1991, a group of Bois’s Romanian friends arranged a concert in Bucharest in his honour.

Four years later, Bon revised Bois’s 1992 Song without Words no. 4.