Johan de Meij

• 1. Introduction

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  Johan de Meij was born on the 23rd of November 1953 in Voorburg, a small city in the Netherlands, and he grew up to compose one of the most-performed wind symphonies in the world. That piece carries a name that will be instantly familiar to millions of readers and filmgoers: The Lord of the Rings. How does a Dutch trombonist come to stake a claim on J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology, and what does it take to turn that claim into a symphony performed by some of the world's great orchestras? The answers run through a conservatory in The Hague, a publishing company founded on a shoestring, and concert halls from Caracas to Fukuoka.

• 2. The Conservatory Years

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  The Royal Conservatory of The Hague is where de Meij received his formal musical training, studying both trombone and conducting. Those two disciplines would define the shape of his career. Before he turned exclusively to composing and conducting, he played trombone and euphonium with major ensembles across the Netherlands. The combination gave him an insider's understanding of what wind and brass instruments can and cannot do, a knowledge base that would inform every score he later wrote. His earliest listed composition, Patchwork for brass sextet, dates from 1979, placing his first serious compositional efforts in the same years he was still performing as a player.

• 3. A Symphony for Middle Earth

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  De Meij spent four years on Symphony No. 1, working on it from 1984 through 1988. The piece is scored for wind ensemble and takes J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional world as its programme. Its first performance came in 1988, and within a year it had won the Sudler Composition Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in wind band composition. Ensembles that have since recorded the work include the London Symphony Orchestra, the North Netherlands Orchestra, the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Amsterdam Wind Orchestra. That list spans three continents and several different ensemble types, a testament to the score's reach. The symphony's success raised de Meij's profile far beyond the Dutch wind band scene.

• 4. Amstel Music and Publishing

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  In 1989, the same year the Sudler Award arrived, de Meij founded the publishing company Amstel Music and became its CEO. That timing was not accidental. A composer who controls his own publishing retains a direct stake in how his work is licensed, performed, and distributed. Amstel Music became the vehicle through which de Meij's growing catalogue would reach conductors and ensembles worldwide. The company's founding placed him in a position to manage a large body of work that continued to expand rapidly through the 1990s and into the following decades.

• 5. A Catalogue Spanning Continents

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  Symphony No. 2, subtitled "The Big Apple" and described as a New York Symphony, appeared in 1993, signaling a shift toward American subjects. The 1996 T-Bone Concerto placed the trombone, his own instrument, at the center of a concert band work. Symphony No. 3, titled "Planet Earth", arrived in 2006, and Symphony No. 4, "Sinfonie der Lieder", followed in 2013, drawing on texts by Friedrich Rückert, Heinrich Heine, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In 2005, de Meij composed Extreme Make-over as the testpiece for the European Brass Band Contest held that year in Groningen. The 2019 Symphony No. 5, "Return to Middle Earth", revisited the Tolkien world that had launched his international career.

• 6. Conducting Around the World

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  De Meij holds the position of principal guest conductor with both the New York Wind Symphony and the Kyushu Wind Orchestra in Fukuoka, Japan. He is also a regular guest conductor of the Simón Bolívar Youth Wind Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela, an ensemble that belongs to El Sistema, the Venezuelan state educational system. That association with El Sistema is significant; the orchestra is one of the most celebrated youth music programmes on earth, and conducting it places de Meij at the intersection of wind band repertoire and large-scale music education. When he is not on the road, he divides his time between Hudson Valley and Manhattan with his wife Dyan, a life that keeps him rooted in the American scene even as his conducting work takes him to Japan and South America.