About Henk Badings

Henk Herman Badings was born in Bandung on the island of Java (Indonesia) on 17  January 1907 and died in Maarheeze (Netherlands) on 26 June  1987.After gaining his diploma as a mining engineer from the Institute of Technology in Delft and starting to occupy himself more and more with music in his spare time, he was offered the post of composition teacher at the Holthaus Conservatoire in Rotterdam in 1934. Since 1935 he taught at the music high school in Amsterdam.
From 1941 to 1945 Badings was director of the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (following Sem Dresden) and in 1961 was offered a post as lecturer of electronic music at the University of Utrecht. In 1962 he was appointed professor of composition at the Stuttgart Staatliche Hochschule für Musik.
As most renowned representative of a new Dutch school, Badings gradually detached himself from the language of musical expression of West European Post-Romanticism.
In his compositions he often experimented with the different possibilities of elaborating tone-row structures. Since 1951 he had worked on the 31-tone temperament and even turned toward experimental music.