Frans Geysen

Frans Geysen was born on 29 July 1936 in Oostham, a small village in the province of Limburg, Belgium, and lived there until he was about 25.

His father was the village sexton and church organist and also conducted the local fanfare, the brass band that was called on for school festivities, processions and plays. His mother ran a small spice shop and sang in the church choir. He had a younger sister. There was no radio in the family home until he was sixteen.

In September 1944, aged eight, he sheltered with his family in the propped-up cellar of their house, which stood at a crossroads in the middle of the fighting at the liberation. Emerging into bright late-summer sunlight, he saw destruction and dead bodies. He later said that from then on no human behaviour, including his own, seemed self-evident to him.

He later suggested that the sounds of his village shaped his music: the synchronised murmur of a praying congregation, a singing procession disappearing round a corner until its head met its tail, and the herringbone masonry of the church tower.

Geysen took the Greek-Latin humanities course at the Don Bosco College of the Salesians in Hechtel. There he was given private piano lessons so that he could play the chapel harmonium, and music soon took over his plans.

At twenty he entered the Lemmensinstituut, then called the Higher Interdiocesan Institute for Church Music, in Mechelen. He studied organ and music education there until 1960 with teachers including Staf Nees (piano and harmony), Piet van den Broeck, Jozef Joris and Edgard De Laet (organ), Marinus de Jong (counterpoint) and Marcel Andries (music education), who encouraged his first attempts at composition.

He continued with music theory under Frits Celis and music history under J.L. Broeckx at the Antwerp conservatory, and fugue under Julien Mestdagh at the Ghent conservatory, where he met Roland Coryn and Willy Carron. In 1965 he attended the Darmstadt summer courses for new music.

Geysen began composing in 1958 with choral works in a post-expressionist style. His first piece, O, als ik dood zal zijn, and Dit denken aan u, both to poems by J.H. Leopold, and Vers 6, to a text by Paul van Ostaijen, were sung by the BRT choir.

In 1962 he was appointed to teach harmony and music analysis at the Lemmensinstituut, where he taught until 1999. From 1975 to 1997 he also taught analysis at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels.

In 1967 he moved away from serialism towards a canonic and repetitive style. His choral cycles elementair and sine nomine (1969) were built on panchromatic canons with pulsations based on Fibonacci numbers. In 1972 Paul Van Nevel's Huelgas Ensemble won first prize at the international recorder competition in Bruges with his quartet Periferisch-Diagonaal-Concentrisch, and on Frans Bruggen's recommendation Schott published it as the fourth title in its Modern Recorder Series.

Between 1973 and 1985 several of his carillon works won prizes from the Mechelen carillon school, starting with the Jef Denyn Prize for Clock-wise (1973). In 1984 the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet premiered De stockmans-installaties alongside an exhibition of porcelain by Piet Stockmans. His television opera Orpheus is in ons (1988) was first staged on 13 February 1992 at the Lemmensinstituut under Piet Swerts. In 1989 he made the tape work Voorlopige stadia van een gegeometriseerde tijd at IPEM in Ghent, and in 1991 the Royal Flemish Philharmonic premiered Staalkaarten voor een hoboconcert with oboist Piet van Bockstal under Muhai Tang.

In the 1990s the recorder quartet Vier op 'n Rij regularly commissioned him, and later works included music theatre (Vuurvast, 1993; Wildzang, 1995), the orchestral Alles heeft zijn tijd 1 (2000), duets for recorders (2003) and many pieces for piano, organ and carillon. In 2003 his music featured at Transit, the Leuven festival of contemporary music, devoted that year to minimal music. Most of his recorder music is published by Mieroprint in Munster.

From 1972 he also wrote essays, analyses and reviews on contemporary music for Adem, Restant, Gamma, Mozaiek and Muziekkrant.

Geysen called for a music stripped of everything superfluous, unimportant or trivial, a kind of pure music free of dramatic or psychological discourse. His scores were notated neutrally, leaving phrasing, articulation and sometimes tempo and scoring to the performer, but he insisted that a good performance must reveal the inner structure of the work and could never be dry or mechanical.

He traced his canons and repetitions back to Ockeghem, Bach and Beethoven, and took his mirror-symmetrical forms from Bartok, whose Concerto for Orchestra he had studied bar by bar as a student. He also drew on the visual arts, from the anti-psychological detachment of Jan van Eyck and Pieter Bruegel to Op art, the Zero movement and Escher.

In a 2007 interview he argued that musical development had stagnated since serialism, minimalism and spectralism, but warned that rejecting recent achievements in favour of pastiche or nostalgia rarely produced admirable work. He described his ideal as an artist who creates without seeking approval, which he said fits no time but frees itself from time.

Geysen was married to Mia Peers, who died before him. They had five children: Lieve, Geert, Bert, Antje and Roel. In 1968 the family moved to Wilsele, near Leuven.

His death notice was signed by his children, grandchildren and great-granddaughter, and mentioned his sister and the Geysen, Noels and Peers families. It also thanked the staff of the Dahlia ward of the Vogelzang residential care centre.

Geysen is regarded as a pioneer of the minimalist and repetitive tendency in Flemish music, having reached it independently of the American minimalists while keeping the constructivism of serial thinking. Periferisch-Diagonaal-Concentrisch remains a staple of the contemporary recorder quartet repertoire, and ensembles such as the Flanders Recorder Quartet have played his music internationally.

As a teacher of harmony and analysis for almost four decades at the Lemmensinstituut and the Brussels conservatory, he influenced many Belgian composers and musicians. The composer Lieven Baeyens, for example, named him as a source of inspiration in composition and analysis.

• Jef Denyn Prize, Royal Carillon School Mechelen, for Clock-wise (1973)
• Further prizes for carillon compositions from the Mechelen carillon school between 1973 and 1985
• First prize at the international recorder competition in Bruges (1972) for the Huelgas Ensemble, with a programme including his Periferisch-Diagonaal-Concentrisch
• Tribute concert organised by the Union of Belgian Composers at the Lemmensinstituut (planned for late November 2007)

Selected works: - O, als ik dood zal zijn, choir (1958) - elementair and sine nomine, choral cycles (1969, 1971) - Periferisch-Diagonaal-Concentrisch, recorder quartet (1972) - Clock-wise, carillon (1973) - Kleine vegetatie, recorders (1974) - Media Vita, carillon (1982) - Installaties, recorder quartet (1984) - Orpheus is in ons, television opera (1988) - Voorlopige stadia van een gegeometriseerde tijd, tape (1989) - Wentelingen, chamber orchestra (1989) - Staalkaarten voor een hoboconcert, oboe and orchestra (1991) - Crypta Musica per Florentini Organum, organ (1991) - Karel Goeyvaerts Memoriaal, piano (1994) - Alles heeft zijn tijd 1, orchestra (2000)

Selected recordings include Periferisch-Diagonaal-Concentrisch by Flautando Koln, Installaties by Springflut(e), Media Vita by Geert D'Hollander and Met vel, rand en tand by the Triatu percussion trio. In 2007 he gave a long interview to Simon De Rijcke for the arts magazine Ambrozijn, later republished by MATRIX.

Frans Geysen died in Leuven on 18 October 2026, aged 90. The cause of death was not made public.

His family announced that the farewell would be held privately, with the urn to be buried later at De Jacht cemetery in Heverlee. Friends will be able to pay their last respects at the Pues funeral home in Winksele-Delle on Friday 23 October 2026.