Michel van der Aa

Michel van der Aa (Dutch pronunciation: [ˌmixəl vɑn dər ˈaː]; born 10 March 1970) is a Dutch composer of contemporary classical music.

Michel van der Aa was born 10 March 1970 in Oss. He trained as a recording engineer at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and studied composition with Diderik Wagenaar, Gilius van Bergeijk and Louis Andriessen.

The music of van der Aa has been performed by ensembles and orchestras internationally. Those include the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble, Freiburger Barockorchester, Ensemble Modern, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, De Nederlandse Opera, Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg, Seattle Chamber Players, Ensemble Nomad Tokyo, musikFabrik, Continuum Ensemble Toronto, SWR Orchestra Baden-Baden & Freiburg, Netherlands Radio Orchestras, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra Sweden, and the Helsinki Avanti Ensemble.

He completed a short program in film directing at the New York Film Academy in 2002. He also participated in the Lincoln Center Theater Director's Lab, a short, intensive course in stage direction in 2007.

Michel van der Aa's music theatre works, including the chamber opera One (2002), the opera After Life (2006, Amsterdam) and the music theatre work The Book of Disquiet, have received international critical and public acclaim. The innovative aspect of these operas is their use of film images and sampled soundtracks as an essential element of the score. Staging, film and music are interwoven into a collage of transparent layers, resulting in a work that is part documentary film and part philosophy.

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