Simeon ten Holt

Composer and pianist Simeon ten Holt was born in Bergen, the Netherlands, in 1923. He studied piano and theory with Jakob van Domselaer, whose influence is considerable, as shown from his first compositions.
  In 1968 Ten Holt founded the Werkgroep Bergen Hedendaagse Muziek (Working Group Contemporary Music Bergen). For this working group he organized concerts solely devoted to contemporary music.
  Ten Holt's considerable oeuvre can be divided into three periods. During the first period,  he developed his own method to come to terms with the concepts of tonality and atonality in reaction to the tonal influence of Van Domselaer. This method, the diagonal idea, resulted in the compositions Diagonaalsuite (1957), Diagonaalsonate (1959) and Diagonaalmuziek (1956-1958).
  In his second period, from 1961 to 1970, he became influenced by serialism, and he also eventually writes a number of electronic works.
  In the third period, which began in the seventies, Ten Holt returned to the piano, the instrument with which his career as a composer started. The major composition of this period, Canto Ostinato, became a great success. He subsequently wrote more piano pieces that are based on the same ideas of repetition and tonality, such as Lemniscaat (1983), Horizon (1985) and Méandres (1999).
  Ten Holt passed away in 2012.