Organist and composer Jan Welmers died in the night from Sunday to Monday at the age of 84. Jan Welmers (1937) worked as an organist in the Grote or Sint-Stevenskerk in Nijmegen from 1974 to 2002. Prior to that, for ten years, he was an organist at the Triumfator Kerk in Katwijk aan Zee.
As a composer, Welmers made his name with a large number of works for organ, most of which were composed in the minimal music style. On the occasion of the composer’s 80th birthday in 2017, Jan Hage recorded the complete organ oeuvre Welmers wrote between 1961 and 2016 on three CDs in the Utrecht Dom Church. Earlier, the Lindenberg label released the CD “Jan Welmers Organ Works”, on which several organists performed the composer’s music on the König organ in the Grote of Sint-Stevenskerk in Nijmegen.
Welmers received his musical training at the conservatories of Groningen and Utrecht, where his teachers included Wim van Beek and Cor Kee. From 1974 to 1998 Welmers himself taught the main subject organ and organ improvisation at the Utrecht Conservatory.
Welmers won various prizes, including the Nationaal Orgelimprovisatieconcours in Bolsward in 1966 and, two years later, the International Organ Improvisation Competition in Haarlem. In 2005 he was awarded the Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck Prize for his oeuvre.
In 2017 the book “De hemel draait nog. About Jan Welmers”, edited by Jan Hage and Hugo Bakker, who died last year (ed. Valeur Ajoutée).
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