Jean-Paul Byloo
Jean-Paul Byloo was born on 8 April 1949 in Veurne. After attending secondary school in that city, he went on to study music at the Royal Conservatory in Ghent, where he earned first prizes in solfège (with Gaston Van Damme), piano (with Abel Matthys), harmony (with Jeanne Vignery), counterpoint (with Roland Coryn) and fugue (with Gery Bruneel). Byloo studied choral conducting at the Kurt Thomas Society in The Hague, and modern compositional techniques with Lucien Goethals. He rounded off his musical studies at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels with a first prize (cum laude) in composition, in the class of André Laporte.
From 1972 to 1982 Byloo was a teacher of solfège and piano at the Municipal Music Academy in Veurne. Byloo conducted the Beauvarlet Kamerkoor in Nieuwpoort (1975-1985) and the Cantores Servadie in Diepenbeek (1985-1988).
Byloo was the head of the Municipal Academy for Music, Word and Dance in Geel until 2013, and a solfège teacher anformal analysis and instrumentation at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels.
Byloo’s work has won awards in composition competitions organised by such bodies as Sabam, Cantabile, the provinces of West-Flanders and Antwerp and the Belgian Royal Academy. His compositions have been premiered at the Flanders Festival, Ars Musica Brussels, de Nacht van Radio 3 and the Belgian-Dutch Music Days. Byloo has composed compulsory works for important music compositions, and has received numerous compositions commissions from leading soloists, chamber-music groups and orchestras.
Many of the composer’s simple choral works and song arrangements have been published by ANZ Antwerp and by the publisher De Notenboom. The Flemish broadcaster (VRT) has made recordings of choral, chamber-music and orchestral works. Byloo’s works have been performed in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland and Hungary.
Since 2023 Byloo is city poet of Geel (Belgium).
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