De Meester, Louis

Louis De Meester was a composer, violinist, pianist and music producer, and one of the pioneers of electronic music in Belgium. Largely self-taught, he earned his living from the 1920s onwards through performances in cafés, accompanying silent films, and providing music for dances and social events. This practical experience helps explain his enduring interest in functional music, film, theatre and ballet. After periods in France and Morocco, where he played jazz and ran a music school, he returned to Belgium and studied counterpoint with Jean Absil, the only formal training in composition he ever received.

At the end of the Second World War, De Meester became a music producer at the NIR, later the BRT. There he experimented with tape recorders, tape manipulation and electroacoustic techniques, influenced by musique concrète. His work always remained oriented towards the listener: he incorporated techniques such as atonality, twelve-tone writing and electronic sound processing, but never treated them as closed systems. Instead, he combined them with jazz, recognisable sounds, playful elements and functional forms. In 1957, he won the Prix Italia with The Great Temptation of Saint Anthony. He later became artistic director of I.P.E.M. and was a co-founder of SPECTRA.