The 'Orpheus of Amsterdam' Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck The seventeenth-century Dutch poet Jocabus Revius wrote a tribute to the composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in which he mentions the only important event in his life that was unrelated to the city of Amsterdam: his birth in Deventer! This internationally renowned composer, organist, organ builder and teacher was in his day rightly celebrated as the 'Orpheus of Amsterdam', the where he lived from childhood on and where, from around 1577 until his death in 1621, he played the organ of the Oude Kerk (Old Church), succeeding his father and preceding his son. 

Sweelinck may be regarded as the last major figure of the two-century European hegemony of socalled 'Franco-Flemish polyphony'. His essential contribution to both instrumental and vocal genres is fairly exceptional, since his predecessors and contemporaries chiefly concentrated on sacred and secular music for the human voice. The fact that his vocal output enjoyed such wide diffusion is mainly explained by the flourishing state of music printing at the time. But his keyboard works have been preserved only in manuscript, thus demonstrating that this repertory was still overshadowed buy vocal music.

Sweelinck - Psaumes & Canciones Sacrae