Ton de Leeuw

His last work, 'Three Shakespeare Songs', was performed on 13 June 1996 by Rosemary Hardy with the Ensemble InterContemporain.

"When I was quite young I once accidentally tuned in on a radio broadcast from an Arabian station. I was thunderstruck: I became deeply aware that there were other people living on this earth, living in thoroughly different conditions, having other thoughts and feelings" (Ton de Leeuw, 1978).

He wrote three operas, all to his own libretti, including a television opera Alceste (1963, after Euripides), the one-act De Droom ("the Dream", 1963), and finally Antigone (1989–1991, after Sophocles). In 2005 his 1964 book on twentieth-century music was published in English translation as Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure (Amsterdam: University Press, 1995), also in Swedish and German.

Taught by Henk Badings, Olivier Messiaen and others, and in his youth influenced by Béla Bartók, De Leeuw was a teacher at the University of Amsterdam and later professor of composition and electronic music at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam from 1959 to 1986, at which institute he served as director from 1971–73. For his notable students, See: List of music students by teacher: K to M#Ton de Leeuw.

He studied ethnomusicology with Jaap Kunst between 1950 and 1954 and the encounter with the Dagar brothers and Drupad on his first visit to India in 1961 deepened a lifelong interest in "transculturation". Since then he has travelled throughout the world: Japan, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, Persia, the Sovjet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland, where he hold workshops and lectures on the East-West relationship in music. In the seventies De Leeuw and André Jurres initiated the renowned Music-Cultural gatherings Musicultura at Queeckhoven House in Breukelen, the Netherlands. See: The World of Music Vol. 20, No. 2, Musicultura: Three Orient-Occident Encounters organized by the Eduard van Beinum Foundation—Final Report (1978), pp. 10–14. This manifested itself in his work for Western instruments by the occasional use of microtonality, as in his String Quartet No. 2 (1964), as well as in compositional plans; Gending (1975) for Javanese gamelan is a rare foray into writing for non-western instruments. In 1956 Ton de Leeuw was awarded the Prix Italia for his radiophonic oratorio Job.

Antonius Wilhelmus Adrianus de Leeuw (Rotterdam, 16 November 1926 - Paris, 31 May 1996) was a Dutch composer. He occasionally experimented with microtonality.