Samuel (Sem) Dresden was (April 20, 1881 in Amsterdam – July 30, 1957 at The Hague). He was a Dutch conductor, composer and teacher.
Dresden was born into a Jewish diamond-broking family and initially studied musical theory with Fred Roeske and composition with Bernard Zweers. On the strength of a promising piano piece, he was sent to study composition and conducting under Hans Pfitzner at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin between 1903-5 and was there encouraged to take an interest in Impressionist music. After returning to the Netherlands, he was until 1914 a choral conductor, as choirmaster at Laren, Amsterdam and Tiel. It was during this period that he married the noted alto Jacoba Dhont, by whom he was to have two sons. Then until 1926 he directed the nine-member Madrigal Society, which earned an international reputation for its painstaking performances of Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary choral music, and afterwards, from 1928 to 1940, a larger chamber choir in Haarlem. To the repertoire of all of these he contributed compositions and arrangements of his own.
From 1915 he lectured on musical subjects, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium. In 1918, with Daniel Ruyneman and Henri Zagwijn, he founded the Society of Modern Dutch Composers (which, however, had ceased to exist by 1924). He began teaching composition at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1919, achieving the post of director in 1924. From 1937-41 he served as director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, a post he was forced to leave after the Nazi take-over, and then again from 1945-49. Among his pupils were the composers Leo Smit, Willem van Otterloo, Jan Mul and Cor de Groot and the conductor Eduard van Beinum. After retiring from teaching in 1949, he devoted himself fully to composition and many of his better-known works were composed very late in his life. Dresden also wrote criticism for the newspaper De Telegraaf (1918–27) and wrote two books on modern music. Shortly before his death he converted to Roman Catholicism.