Stéphane Vande Ginste (b. 1971)

Stéphane Vande Ginste is a Belgian composer and pianist. He studied piano with Jan Michiels and composition with André Laporte at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Vande Ginste is the winner of numerous composition competitions. He has been awarded six times as a laureate of the Cantabile Composition Competition and, more recently, received the Big Prize for Pedagogical Contribution at the Artistes en herbes competition in Luxembourg. For many years, he served as composer in residence with Ensemble Emanon, conducted by Raf De Keninck. During this period, he composed his largest work to date, Darkness (2007), for double string quartet, wind quintet, piano, percussion, and two narrators, based on texts by Lord Byron and Charlie Chaplin. The work was recorded on the CD Darkness – In Flanders ’Fields. He also collaborated closely with Ensemble Arco Baleno, for whom he composed the Chamber Concerto in 2009, recorded on the CD Kaleidoscope. In 2016, Vande Ginste completed an ambitious compositional project: he wrote one piano piece every day for an entire year, each lasting at least one minute, resulting in a collection of 366 piano pieces. In 2017, he was invited as a guest composer to the World Piano Conference in Novi Sad (Serbia). In 2018, he composed his longest solo piano work, 50 Variations on a “Valse lente”, which was premiered and recorded by Dutch pianist Marcel Worms. Currently, Vande Ginste is working on a large-scale cycle aiming to compose a sonata with piano for every instrument of the symphony orchestra. To date, he has completed eight sonatas (for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, horn, and tuba). His Flute Sonata won first prize in the chamber music category at the National Flute Convention in Chicago. Alongside his concert works, Stéphane Vande Ginste has composed an extensive body of educational music, performed worldwide, and has recently expanded his output to include works for children’s choir. His music is published by Metropolis Publishers (UMMP) and Euprint. He teaches music theory and piano at Academie Schoten and is a member of SABAM as well as an active member of the Union of Belgian Composers (UBC).