Dick Raaijmakers
Dutch composer, theater maker, theorist and electronic music pioneer (1930–2013)
Dick Raaijmakers (Maastricht, 1 September 1930 – The Hague, 4 September 2013), also known as Dick Raaymakers or Kid Baltan, was a Dutch composer, theater maker and theorist. He is considered a pioneer in the field of electronic music and tape music, but has also produced numerous musical theater pieces and theoretical publications.
Raaijmakers studied piano at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. From 1954 to 1960, he worked at Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. in Eindhoven in the electro-acoustic field. Under the pseudonym Kid Baltan, a anadrome of "Dik Natlab" – Raaijmakers' nickname, he realized three tests of popular music with the help of electronic means. This work has been collected and re-released under the name Popular Electronics. Early Dutch electronic music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956-1963. From 1960 to 1962, he was affiliated with the University of Utrecht as a researcher. From 1963 to 1966, he worked with Jan Boerman in a self-established studio for electronic music in The Hague. From 1966 until his retirement in 1995, he worked as a teacher of Electronic and Contemporary Music at the Royal Conservatory (The Hague) and from 1991 as a teacher of music theater at the interfaculty Image and Sound (later renamed to ArtScience, and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Antwerp).
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q359329. VIAF identifies the subject as 39560281. The Library of Congress control number is n84017130. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930, 2013, 1954 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dick Raaijmakers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.