Tera de Marez Oyens facts for kids
Tera de Marez Oyens (born August 5, 1932 – died August 29, 1996) was a talented Dutch composer. She created many different kinds of music during her life.
Tera de Marez Oyens was born in a town called Velsen. Her birth name was Woltera Gerharda Wansink. She went to the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, which is a special music school. There, she studied the piano with a teacher named Jan Odé. She finished her studies in 1953. It was at this school that people noticed her amazing skill for writing music. She started by composing her first pieces, including music for small groups of instruments and collections of songs. Later, she also wrote music for young people's groups.
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Music for Churches
After her studies, Tera became a cantor for a church in Hilversum. A cantor is someone who leads singing and music in a church. This job meant she spent a lot of time working on church music. She wrote 14 melodies for church songbooks that came out in 1973. The words for these songs were written by people she knew, like Muus Jacobse and Willem Barnard. She even wrote the music for a famous song called "Zolang er mensen zijn op aarde" by Huub Oosterhuis.
Exploring Electronic Music
In the 1960s, Tera became very interested in electronic music. This is music made using electronic instruments and technology. She studied this new type of music with a teacher named Gottfried Michael Koenig at a place called the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht. She composed electronic pieces like Sound and Silence (1971) and Mixed Feelings (1973). She also wrote a piece called Pente Sjawoe, which is a tone poem, a type of music that tells a story or describes something.
Teaching and Composing Full-Time
In 1978, Tera de Marez Oyens started teaching at the conservatory in Zwolle. She taught there until 1988. Her lessons helped students find their own unique style of music. But Tera really wanted to spend all her time writing her own music. After her second husband passed away, she became a full-time composer. During this time, she wrote a big piece called The Odyssey of Mr. Good-Evil (1981).
In 1988, she wrote pieces for an international cello competition in Scheveningen. The next year, in 1989, she was invited to be a special composer at Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA.
Her Many Works
Tera de Marez Oyens wrote more than 200 musical works! Many of these were specially requested by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and different TV and radio networks. In 1995, she was asked to write a piece called Unison to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.
Later Life
Tera de Marez Oyens was married to Gerrit de Marez Oyens and later to Menachem Arnoni. Even though she became very ill, she married the famous cartoonist Marten Toonder in 1996. Tera de Marez Oyens passed away on August 29, 1996, in Hilversum.
