Born in 1954, Amsterdam

Chiel Meijering studied at the Amsterdams Sweelinck Conservatorium and studied composition with Ton de Leeuw, instrumentation with Geert van Keulen and percussion with Jan Labordus and Jan Pustjens.

Chiel Meijering is considered an outsider among Dutch classical music composers. He has an enormous output, writes fast and his music is extremely accessible, direct and with a provocative pop-like quality. He has written more than four hundred compositions, mostly for smaller ensembles, which have been heard in concerts in the Netherlands and other countries. Meijering is not averse to making excursions into what he refers to as “light music, whatever that means”. He composed a piece for the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra with two rappers (‘Here I come!’) in a series of school concerts and during the2000 European Football Championship the American opera singer Renee Fleeming, conducted by Valerie Gergiev, sang a 4 minute version of ‘You’ll never walk alone’, the football song par excellence, on a large stage in the Maas.

For the 100th anniversary of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam he wrote ‘Gedoogzone’ (1988) for two pianos, performed by Wieneke Jordans and Leo van Doeselaar.

To mark the opening in 1996 of the Ajax football stadium ‘De Arena’ he wrote for the Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Groot Omroep choir, conducted by Lawrence van Renes, an arrangement/version of “We will rock you” and “We are the campions” by the pop group Queen.

Chiel Meijering says about his contribution 'überhappy (1)' for Loud & Clear TOO: "The music immediately opens with an 'überhappy'-motif. A three note bouncing lick on a low E-string of my electric guitar bending up and down for shear lust of feeling happy. A funky bass guitar and harpsichord join in, with on top a vibraphone playing quasi improvised jazzy runs. Since feeling happy or even the word love in music is such a cliché, I decided to use another sort of cliché, a plastic sort of sampled voice you can just buy in any music shop, the female singer yelling "Gotta have it", "need it" and "be there!"
Christian Jankowski inspired me to this in one of his emails suggesting I would write something and he "would try to dance to it". Since he thought I would, probably being held for an avant-gardistic composer, write something non-rhythmically and unharmonically like they used to in the last century I decided to tease him with a dance-rhythm in the drums. Music that became so attractive this way you really would like to start dancing to it. Now I became very curious what would be his answer......"

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