Mécénat Musica | Jaap Nico Hamburger: Composer-in-residence

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Scores and notes of Mécénat Musica Composer-in-Residence and Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes composers and librettists are offered to emerging Quebec and Canadian artists royalty-free, forever!

Juno-nominated Jaap Nico Hamburger has composed or is composing 112 movements of Mécénat Musica Compositions featuring symphonies, concertos, chamber music, oratorios, and opera, including multiple recordings with the Orchestre Métropolitain, Ensemble Caprice, Ensemble ArtChoral, the Residentie Orkest (Netherlands) and the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra.

“The music just comes to me. I just write down what I hear,” says Hamburger. Only seven years after leaving a full-time career as a cardiologist to devote his life to composing, Hamburger, 67, has an impressive list of commissions and premieres, including two operas.

Music was always part of his life. At the tender age of three, while living in the Netherlands, he took over the 78-rpm record player originally given as a birthday gift to his older brother who was more interested in train sets. “I played the 1920s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic over and over again,” says Hamburger. When he was four, he sang the entire Ode to Joy fourth movement from memory. “My mom gave me music theory lessons with a lady,” he recalls. “She was also a piano teacher.”

As a six-year-old, Hamburger attended his first live concert at the Concertgebouw, a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. “It completely opened my soul to a different language,” he says. At 13, he heard Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. “Mahler had a deep understanding of who he was and how his music related to society in Vienna in the early 20th century,” Hamburger says. “He had an impressive technical ability to put it in sound.”

After high school, Hamburger went on to graduate in 1984 from the conservatory and then, in 1986, completed medicine. “My mother said ‘You will also go to med school’ and wanted me to be secure and safe, and do both,” Hamburger explains.

By this time, Hamburger was on his way to a promising career as a concert pianist—so much so that in 1985, when the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam replaced its 1957 Hamburg Steinway D, they offered it to Hamburger for a modest fee. This is the same Steinway that Arthur Rubinstein had coveted!

Hamburger pursued both careers until 1993, when he accepted a directorship at Erasmus University, after which he gave up performing.

Despite being trained in minimally invasive heart surgery, which he practised for 25 years, Hamburger says: “When I was only doing music or medicine, I was not happy. It’s the combination that gave me direction and purpose.”

Composing

Hamburger refocused his musical pursuits on composing and found that he enjoyed this more than piano performance. “I had been playing with composing,” he says. “For many years, I was a member of a rock group. I was writing songs.”

Hamburger’s first serious composition came in 1995 as a “commission” from a friend. “I got an invitation from a painter to compose a large-scale work for a full orchestra that would be played during her exhibition at a major museum.” Somehow, that first opus is now lost, but it led to a few commissions for Dutch television, universities, and for a film for the Discovery channel.

“I was doing heart surgery during the day,” he says. “Then I had dinner with my kids and helped them with homework. And then, when it was quiet, I composed.”

Canada

In 2000, Hamburger moved to Canada to work at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver’s two main hospitals in their Interventional Cardiology program.

Hamburger’s mother died nine years ago at the age of 95, but not before helping him to change course once again. “She sat me down for dinner and said ‘Enough is enough. You’ve been doing your medical career for decades. Why don’t you go back to being a musician?’”

It took a few years for Hamburger to wind down his practice to the point when in 2018 he left his medical career to devote himself full-time to music. “I said, if not now, then when? It was an adventure, because nobody knew me and I had no network. Within months, people started to listen and said yes, let’s do something.”

Hamburger then met Latitude 45’s Barbara Scales who became his manager, as well as Jeremy VanSlyke at Leaf Music who agreed to a number of albums including the composer’s piano concerto, a disc of the two chamber symphonies (nominated for a Juno) and a third album of chamber music. For ATMA, he contributed an overture to Ensemble Caprice’s Handel’s Messiah (also nominated for a Juno) and a disc of large a cappella works for choir which will be released in 2026.

Composition style

As a composer, Hamburger is self-taught and claims to have no defined style. “I usually have two or three commissions ahead,” he says. “Every piece has a story or concept. I spend weeks reading deeply on the topic—five to 15 books—to distill what I want to communicate. That research often takes longer than writing the notes. Once I have the story, the music is essentially composed in my head; I go to the studio and write directly into the full score.”

Mécénat Musica Composer-in-Residence

Hamburger moved to Montreal in 2019 and this corresponded with his appointment as Composer-in-Residence at Mécénat Musica. “Matthias Maute saw my scores and gave up his position as Composer-in-Residence for me,” says Hamburger. “My role gives me access to colleagues and orchestras who can ask me to write for them. To support younger musicians in the Mécénat Musica community, I let them play my music without rental fees.” Hamburger’s opera Ariella was supposed to premiere in New York but was interrupted by COVID. “Francis Choinière of Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes wanted to perform it, and opera-in-concert performances were given in Montreal, Toronto and Quebec City,” says Hamburger. For Marc Boucher and Festival Classica, Hamburger is composing Sarah, an opera based on the life of the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt and her complicated relationship with the Bishop of Montreal, based on a French libretto by Bertrand Laverdure. Its premiere is set for 2027.