Robert Zuidam (23/09/1964), a Dutch composer, born in Gouda, the Netherlands, and studied composition with Philippe Boesmans and Klaas de Vries at the Conservatory of Rotterdam. In 1989 he was a Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachussets, USA, where he studied with Oliver Knussen and Lukas Foss. He was awarded the Koussevitzky Composition Prize for Fishbone, a work for wind instruments and piano, and a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship enabled him to return to Tanglewood as a student. After various performances of his work on the Festival of Contemporary Music, he returned to Tanglewood as a teacher in 1999, 2001 and '03, a.o. as Artist in Residence with financial support of the Velmans Foundation. In 2010, Zuidam taught and lectured at Harvard University as Erasmus Professor, and was awarded the Kees van Baaren-Prize in The Hague, for his opera Rage d'amours.