Simeon ten Holt

Born in the Dutch town of Bergen in 1923, Simeon ten Holt was one of the leading European exponents of minimalism, renowned especially for his 1976 keyboard masterwork Canto Ostinato, which was premiered three years later. This two-hour-plus epic is held together by a series of closely related, recurring bass patterns, and was deliberately designed to accommodate differing instruments and numbers of performers, while also leaving many performance decisions to its interpreters. After studying piano and theory with Jakob van Domselaer, ten Holt moved to Paris in 1949 for several years, studying informally with Darius Milhaud. In 1954 he returned to Bergen, where he remained for the rest of his life, organising concerts of contemporary music and giving piano recitals of his own work. Although he was a prolific composer, Canto Ostinato towers above his other compositions, a dazzling, tonal master statement of lifelong musical concerns. He died in 2012, aged 89.