Welcome to BelgianComposer

Dear visitors,

Geert Van Hoorick was born in 1968 in Lokeren, Belgium. He received a musical education (piano, music history, harmony, and for a little while also organ and horn) at the Academy for Music and Word at the Town of Lokeren. Eventually he decided not to go for a professional musical education, but for law studies. He graduated as a Master in Law at Ghent University. His PhD about nature conservation law was awarded with the Belgian VDK-award for Sustainable Development. From 2000 on he is professor in administrative and environmental law at Ghent University, and he was also a lawyer till 2020. He is married, has two children and lives in Belgium.

He started composing as a teenager, but then the law studies, the professional career and the family life did not allow to spend time on composing. From 2002 on he has started composing again. He now uses the music notation software Sibelius (what allows the composer to hear what he composes while composing), since end 2025 combined with NotePerformer. As a composer he is merely self-educated and composing stays a (steadily growing) hobby, what implies that he can do it only in his spare time. Currently he is making new compositions as well as (technically) revising existing ones.

The style of Geert Van Hoorick can be called modern-classical, i.e. neo-classical or neo-romantic with some impressionist and more modern influences.

Since the end of 2006 he has been publishing his compositions on the website SibeliusMusic, now ScoreExchange, to share. Since the end of 2009 he has launched a YouTube-channel under the name of BelgianComposer, where you can enjoy score moving videos and rehearsal (play along) videos. Since 2011 he has a personal website, that he has now moved to this google page. Since the end of 2013 he has been publishing his compositions on the website of IMSLP, to share.

Meanwhile musicians from all over the world are playing his music and since 2010 there have been a lot of performances in Belgium and abroad. Among the performed compositions are (as far as the composer knows): the 1st suite for brass; the trio for flute, clarinet and piano; the 1st clarinet sonata; the tuba sonata; several of the 24 piano preludes; the little suite for piano; the ancient dances or 3rd oboe sonata (partly); the organ passacaglia; the organ lullabies; the guitar concerto; the 1st horn concerto; the bassoon concerto; the 6st organ symphony; the harpsichord sonata. All his compositions may be publicly performed for free.

In the book Das Konzert (Wieland Schmidt, Helbling, 2020, p. 87) an excerpt of the guitar concerto is used to illustrate balanced instrumentation between the solo guitar and the orchestra.

Some important messages to potential performers: on IMSLP you can have the sheet music for free, but the parts (and sometimes also the whole score) are not always up to date; on ScoreExchange everything is up to date, but the parts are automatically extracted from the score file and are sometimes a bit messy; if you are going to perform you may contact the composer for clean parts; on the score it is indicated whether the score has been revised recently (he is in the process of doing that, and of course you may ask the composer; if the score moving video on YouTube is of recent origin, the score has been recently revised).

Thanks for visiting and please enjoy his music.

Links:

https://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/geertvanhoorick

https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Van_Hoorick,_Geert

https://www.youtube.com/user/BelgianComposer

To contact him simply use the “contact seller" function on the website of ScoreExchange (link above).