Born in Paramaribo on 16 August 1921 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris in 2017, Majoie Hajary was a Surinamese-Dutch composer and pianist. She received her first music lessons in the convent on the Gravenstraat in Paramaribo; from 1937 she studied piano with Nelly Wagenaar and composition with Hendrik Andriessen at the Amsterdamsch Conservatorium. In 1942 she took her diploma as a performing pianist cum laude, and in 1943 she received the conservatory’s first prize for “Hindoustani fantaisie”. From 1949 she continued her training in Paris: composition with Nadia Boulanger, counterpoint with Annette Dieudonné, piano with Yves Nat, and further studies with Henri Büsser and Louis Aubert. From 1947 concert tours took her to Central and South America. Her œuvre comprises close to a hundred works and combines European art music with music from Suriname, Africa, Asia, India and with jazz, among them “Requiem pour Mahatma Gandhi” (1968), “Da pinawiki” (1974) and the opera projects around “The Story of Suriname” and “La larme d’or”.
Majoie Hajary
Composer / Piano
