Dick Raaijmakers

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Dick Raaijmakers was a Dutch composer, theatre maker and thinker about music. He was born in 1930 in Maastricht and studied piano at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. From 1954 to 1960 he worked in the physics laboratory of Philips in Eindhoven, the NatLab, on electro-acoustic research. His nickname there was Dik NatLab. Read backwards, that became his stage name: Kid Baltan.

Music and breakthrough

Under that name, together with Tom Dissevelt, he made some of the first electronic pop music in the world. They cut and spliced magnetic tape and had electronically generated sounds play cheerful little melodies. Their best-known record is The Fascinating World of Electronic Music from 1959, which includes Song of the Second Moon, which had already appeared separately earlier. In America the record later came out under that title. The French electronic musician Jean-Jacques Perrey called their work a source of inspiration.

Influence

After Philips, Raaijmakers worked at Utrecht University and had a studio of his own in The Hague with Jan Boerman. He helped to found STEIM and until 1995 taught electronic and contemporary music at the conservatoire in The Hague. Later he turned to music theatre, installations and essays, in which he linked visual art, film and science with music. He is regarded as a founder of Dutch electronic music. He died in 2013.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1960Electronic Music: Badings: Capriccio For Violin And Two Sound Tracks / Badings: Genese / Badings: Evolutions / Raaijmakers: Contrasts

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 8: Electronic Music^NL Reader

Mentioned in other articles

• Electronic studio and musique concrète GenreAnd at Philips in Eindhoven Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt worked.

See also

• Electronic studio and musique concrète