Rudi Martinus van Dijk

Rudi Martinus van Dijk (27 March 1932 – 29 November 2003) was a Dutch and Canadian composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music. The voice of a highly original creator is heard in every Van Dijk music, regardless of his stylistic trends it favours. Béla Bartók noted that sources are less important in framing a composer’s achievement than how he uses them. What makes Van Dijk’s orchestral music at once beguiling and immediately recognisable as a personal expression is discernable on the smaller sound-scale of his chamber compositions. One of Van Dijk’s most notable characteristics, a purposeful firmness of the bass line, imbues his music with an unfailing sense of logical and expressive direction, even in the context of a highly inflected harmonic chromaticism. It would take a bold annotator to pin Van Dijk’s artistic origins down to one or other national or stylistic source. Van Dijk had unusual success blending an emotional intensity, at times evocative of the world of Austro-German expressionism, with a fascinating subtlety and indirectness of utterance suggestive rather of French affinities. From time to time, the analyst with a taste for such trouvailles may detect what seem