Bertus van Lier was born in Utrecht on 10 September 1906 and was interested in music from an early age. At the age of eight he took cello lessons at the local music school in his home town and he sang in the boys’ choir, performing Bach's St Matthew Passion. During his early years as a pupil at the Utrecht City Gymnasium, he was fascinated by the problems of composing music. In 1923, at sixteen years old, he completed his first composition, Prologue for cello and piano. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of his gymnasium, Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae was performed, with incidental music by Willem Pijper; Van Lier was given the demanding role of Messenger for which he was commended in the press. He was much inspired by this experience and decided he would be a composer, beginning as a student of Pijper. In an interview dated 3 June 1964 Van Lier tells the interviewer:

I met Pijper for the first time at the Utrecht Gymnasium around 1925. We celebrated the lustrum with the performance of Euripides’ Bacchae. I was part of the cast. The music was Pijper’s. I had been composing from my 12th year on and I was very much impressed by Pijper's music. I cornered him and he looked at my music and he said: ‘Alright, I’ll give you lessons’. But after I passed my final examination of the gymnasium, he told me: ‘First of all get yourself registered at the Conservatorium!’ And that is how things went.

Deciding on his programme at the Amsterdam Conservatoire proved a little complicated: Pijper was teaching harmony, not composition, and van Lier decided to study with Pijper privately. He wanted to study singing as his main subject, but Pijper refused to accept a singer as his composition student. Van Lier therefore studied cello at the Conservatoire, as a student of Max Orobio de Castro. Meanwhile, van Lier's father nourished hopes that his only son would study law, to follow in his father's footsteps as director of the Utrechtsche Hypotheekbank (Utrecht Mortgage Bank), but when his son presented his First Symphony in 1927–28, there were no longer any doubts about his chosen career.

Bob Hanf was born in Amsterdam on 25 November 1894. His parents, Joseph Hanf and Laura Romberg, assimilated German Jews, were originally from Westphalia and had settled in the Netherlands shortly after their marriage. Bob grew up in an affluent, artistic environment: his mother was an accomplished pianist. He received his first violin lessons in the ensemble classes led by George Scager, a violist in the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Until the age of 30, he spent most of his holidays in Germany with his uncle Moritz and aunt Rebecca, whose inner circle included several artists and intellectuals. Thanks to these regular visits, Hanf, at an early age, came into contact with the latest movements in art, literature and philosophy.

Hanf showed a genuine talent for drawing and he received lessons from the famous Amsterdam painter George Breitner. He became a versatile artist: drawing, painting, writing, playing the violin and composing. But his father wanted his son to succeed him at the chemical company ‘N. V. Oranje’, and so Hanf enrolled at the Technical University in Delft, studying chemistry and architecture. During his studies he drew caricatures of his professors and classmates, and he made a large number of charcoal drawings in an Expressionist style, resembling those of Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There was also plenty of music-making in Delft; Hanf often played with the composers Harold C. King and Ignace Lilien. In 1919, he co-founded ‘In die Coornschuere’ (‘In the Grain Warehouse’), named after the Delft warehouse in which it was based, where he organised concerts, lectures and exhibitions.

Around this time, Hanf met the writers Hendrik Marsman, Jan Spierdijk and Simon Vestdijk. Marsman wrote in his book Self-portrait of J. F. and Other Prose: ‘Hanf, slightly bent, somewhat tired, the collar of his jacket straight up, violin case carefully under his arm, entered the long narrow room on the Voorstraat [in Delft], where we awaited him around a scorching stove’. In Vestdijk's book The Last Chance, Hanf is portrayed as ‘Bob Neumann’. Hanf himself wrote two plays, three novels and several poems, influenced by Frank Wedekind's anti-bourgeois morality and Franz Kafka's surrealistic atmosphere and gloomy world view.

Franz Weisz (Weisz Ferenc in Hungarian) decided to leave his home country, Hungary, because of the unstable political situation and its anti-Semitism. In the Netherlands he enjoyed two decades of personal and musical freedom before being deported to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where he died. Weisz was an exceptional pianist who left behind an output of several virtuoso piano pieces.

Born in Budapest on 2 August 1893, Ferenc Weisz was the third son of Ignaz Weisz and Terezia Friedman. He was a musical prodigy and by the age of eleven was a student at the Nemzeti Zenede, the National Conservatoire. He studied piano with Stephan Tomka and composition with Károly Aggházy, both former students of Liszt. In 1914, Weisz completed his education with excellent results in both disciplines.

During the First World War, Hungary fought on the Austrian side and lost. It is unknown whether Weisz took part. After the war, the political situation worsened: a split from Austria, revolution and counter-revolution, a rapid succession of rulers, first the Communist Béla Kun, followed by Miklós Horthy and increasing anti-Semitism. It is likely that Weisz gave piano lessons at this time, maybe even recitals (although Jewish musicians were increasingly barred from public performances). In 1919, he was appointed as a teacher at the Conservatoire in Budapest. He left for the Netherlands in 1920.

The family story goes that ‘during a concert tour’ in 1920, Weisz chose to stay in Amsterdam, but the reality was probably more prosaic. His fame as a pianist was not such that an international concert tour was plausible. His older brother, Simon, had preceded him to the Netherlands and his aunt, married to an Amsterdam diamond-worker, had lived there for 40 years. Amsterdam seemed to be a safe haven after the war, the Netherlands having remained neutral. Weisz was embraced by his ever-growing family in Amsterdam. ‘Uncle Ferri’ was a welcome guest in his brother Simon's home, always present when Hungarian goulash was on the menu.

As a pianist, one among several other Hungarian exiles, Ferenc quickly adapted to the Amsterdam music scene. A fellow countryman, the violinist Alfred Indig, who like Weisz had graduated from the National Conservatoire, was now a member of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Up until the Second World War, Israel J. Olman had been a celebrated choral conductor and composer. He wrote synagogal music as well as music for socialist choirs, to be performed at major singing competitions. His fame, and the fact that he was married to a Catholic, offered him some protection during the war. In the post-war years his reputation as a composer rapidly diminished, resulting in financial difficulties. The world had changed, and his musical idiom had become outdated.

It must have been a memorable evening, on 5 October 1924 in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, when the composer, conductor and teacher Israel Olman was honoured by the Union of Workers’ Choral Societies on his 25th anniversary as a music professional. His works were performed by five choirs, and together, under the composer's direction, they premiered his new work Sullima. The programme booklet summarised the significance of Olman's skill as a musician, outlining how he had matured as a composer, appealing particularly to those who loved and promoted melodious choral works.

Now, over 50 years after his death, Israel Jacques Olman (usually known as Ies), whose reputation has faded into oblivion, deserves a revival. He was born on 17 August 1883 in the Sint Anthoniebreestraat, in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. His parents were part of the Jewish proletariat identifying more with the growing socialist movement of the late nineteenth century than adhering to Orthodox Judaism. His mother, Raatje Hamel, came from a musical family and his father, Jesaias (Jacques), was an amateur singer and a diamond worker, who worked his way up to become a broker in pearls and diamonds.

He was a talented child. At six, he started violin lessons and at twelve he was enrolled at a music school. His father was in favour of a wide-ranging musical as well as a solid general education. By 1895 he was studying violin, piano, music theory, choral singing and composition. He was taught, among others, by the renowned choir conductor and composer Frederik Roeske, the composer Bernard Zweers, who taught at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, and the conductor and organist Evert Cornelis.

Daniël Belinfante's manuscripts, donated in 1955 to the Netherlands Music Institute in The Hague by his widow Martha Belinfante-Dekker, remained untouched for decades. His output contains some 100 compositions, consisting of solo concertos, an orchestral suite, string quartets, works for strings and piano, songs and choral works. The neglect is not new: Belinfante's music was rarely performed during his lifetime. After his violent death in Fürstengrube, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, it would take 60 years before his music was rediscovered.

Belinfante was born in the Watergraafsmeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam on 6 March 1893, the third child in a family of ten. He received his first violin lessons from his father, Aron, a diamond worker, and his uncle Sidney, and studied piano with Ary Belinfante, his great-uncle, the director of a music school in the centre of Amsterdam. In 1915 Belinfante continued the family tradition, becoming director of a music school in the Watergraafsmeer, where he also taught piano and composition. Although the building on the corner of the Hogeweg and Pythagorasstraat still exists, it is no longer recognisable as a music school.

In 1923 Belinfante married his student Martha Dekker, and together they continued running the school. In addition to lessons in classical music – primarily given by musicians from the Concertgebouw Orchestra – they launched a jazz curriculum for both amateur and advanced music students. In 1934, long before jazz was introduced at Dutch conservatoires, they established the Eerste Hollandsche Jazzklasse (First Dutch Jazz College). Lessons were offered in jazz piano, trumpet, double-bass, trombone, sousaphone, tuba, banjo, mandolin, clarinet, flute, saxophone and percussion.

Belinfante composed a Concertino for piano and orchestra for his students. This piece was broadcast with two eight-year-old soloists and the VARA Radio Orchestra on 2 June 1937. A caption underneath a photograph of Belinfante as conductor reads: ‘Performance by the school orchestra during the second movement of the piano concertino under the direction of the composer in the Recital Hall – Amsterdam Concertgebouw’. Little is known about other concerts of Belinfante's work; most probably, the performances that did take place were private. Belinfante may have been too insecure about his music to expose it to a wider public. On the other hand, one imagines that a composer needs feedback to define his or her creative position and, if necessary, make adjustments.

Beyond any federal and state mandates, it would take the cultivation of personal relationships with the board's white trustees by the “black woman on board” for the CSU trustees to begin to embrace affirmative action, both in principle and in practice. Within the California State University system, Mabel Kinney was the first woman appointed to the CSU trustee board in 1960. It would take another fourteen years before the board would have its first non-white woman trustee, with the appointment of Dr. Claudia Hampton. As the first Black woman board member, Hampton's appointment might have functioned as an indicator of racial equality and progress. Yet at the time Hampton was installed as a member of the board in 1974, hostile racial attitudes toward people of color were still deeply entrenched in California as in other parts of the country. Thus it should come as no surprise that Hampton's appointment to the CSU Board of Trustees was met with shock for some and open hostility from others. Claudia Hampton had to approach her work using finesse, subtlety, and shrewd thinking to counter this hostility and be effective in her role as trustee. This chapter focuses on how she enacted sly civility through a variety of strategies and tactics to protect affirmative action and push back against those forces that worked to obstruct, limit, or eliminate programs designed to increase access and equity for women and people of color within the California State University system.

In recounting the first few years of her appointment, Hampton told the story of an incident where fellow trustee board member, Wendell Witter, a managing partner of Dean Witter and Company, used a racist term during a disagreement with Hampton about affirmative action policy implementa-tion. Hampton recalled, “Wendell Witter—He was the one who made the comment in a board meeting “I don't understand this. There's a problem. There's a n----- in the woodpile.” The specific phrase Witter used, “n----- in the woodpile,” was a figure of speech used in the United States dating back to the 19th century referring to the concealment of slaves under piles of fire-wood or other hiding places. Newman Ivey White describes how the phrase eventually meant that something was suspicious or wrong.

Paul Bond, a staff writer for The Daily Sundial, the main student newspaper at CSU Northridge, wrote in a 1993 opinion piece entitled “Affirmative Action Is No Longer Effective” that “today, affirmative action means hiring quotas, lower standards and expectations for minorities, lawsuits where employers must prove their innocence (in direct conflict with the Constitution), race norming (artificially raising scores on aptitude tests for certain minority groups), and reverse discrimination.” To support his claims, Bond referenced the work of conservative African American scholars Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, arguing that affirmative action hurts African Americans. But more than simply name-dropping two African American opponents of affirmative action, Bond claimed that “currently, about three quarters of African American college students drop out before graduation, including thousands from elite colleges,” without offering any evidence to support his claims.

Bond could get away with making such unsubstantiated claims about affirmative action, since public support for legislation and programming to promote educational equity started to wane in the early 1990s. Campus newspapers throughout the Cal State system, and mainstream dailies like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, regularly ran articles and opinion pieces during this period lambasting affirmative action and ethnic studies curricula as part of a multicultural movement that had gone too far. Critics of affirmative action claim that colleges and universities lowered standards and denied qualified white students access to the nation's colleges and universities in favor of less-qualified minority students. The end result of these special overtures to racial and ethnic minority students was a growing resentment by white students and working-class white voters, who saw affirmative action as a threat to their chances of getting an education and a good job. In this chapter I examine the impact of the culture wars on educational policymaking within CSU, culminating in the death of affirmative action with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, just two years after Claudia Hampton's death from lung cancer.

White resentment towards affirmative action had been a reality since the inception of this legislation, reaching fever-pitch with the Bakke decision in 1978. However, it was not until the early 1990s that the Republican Party began making race, multiculturalism, and affirmative action the centerpiece of their 1992 election campaign.

The term ‘homo universalis’ or Renaissance Man originated as a description of individuals who helped humanity escape the dark ages by virtue of their open minds and tenacious pursuit of new knowledge. Leo Kok was such a polymath during his own lifetime. He was a gifted football player, a pianist of the highest order, a vocal coach and a composer. He also had an immense interest in literature and politics. As an anti-fascist activist, he joined the Dutch resistance movement during the Second World War. He survived torture in Buchenwald, but his piano career was ruined. After the war, he turned his passion to literature and books.

Leo Kok was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1893. His Portuguese-Jewish mother died during childbirth; his father died when he was eight years old. He was raised by his grandmother and, after her death, by an aunt in The Hague. Perhaps these early losses and premature independence played a role in his many activities as a youngster. He graduated from the Rotterdam Maritime Academy and studied piano at the Conservatoire in The Hague. His composition teacher was Willem Pijper, whom Kok admired for his experimental style. It is believed that Kok played the Dutch premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. In the meantime, he also excelled at boxing and football and was even selected for the Dutch national football team, which brought him eventually to Paris, the city that would play a pivotal role in his life.

In 1919, he married the flamboyant singer Hetty Marx, but Kok, who was a charming, flirtatious man, was not cut out for married life. Hetty and their son Iddo saw little of him in those first few years. He was already working as a pianist and a conductor aboard a cruise liner, with regular services between Rotterdam and Rio de Janeiro, and he spent long periods of time in Brazil and Argentina.

In the 1920s and 1930s he was living alternately in Paris and Ascona in Switzerland and worked as a vocal coach. He reputedly had a beautiful baritone voice. From 1924, he performed with the violinist Lidus Klein van Giltay, the Finnish cellist Lennart von Zweyberg and other musicians. He spent a year in Berlin as the accompanist to, among others, the German dancer Charlotte Bara, to whom he dedicated the last of his Trois danses exotiques for piano.

Leo Smit's music sounds thoroughly French, with bright and breezy notes that seemingly flow easily from his pen. In reality, it took many years before his musical ideas were incorporated into his compositions. And however French it may sound, Smit was heart and soul attached to Amsterdam and the Netherlands. His song for women's choir, De bruid (‘The Bride’), set to words by Jan Prins, is a declaration of love: ‘The groom was the sunlight and Holland was his bride’. It took years before his legacy would reach an international audience.

Leo Smit came from a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi family: his father, Rephaël Smit, was a wealthy shoe-merchant descended from an Ashkenazi family, and the other three grandparents, two of whom were also cousins, were descended from the Sephardic Ricardo family. Leo's grandfather, Jozef David Smit, was a teacher and cantor in the synagogue. Born on 14 May 1900 in Amsterdam, Leo was raised in a mainly secularised family in which there was hardly any connection to Jewish tradition, which is reflected in the names of both children: Leopold and Eleonore Josephine (Nora).

Smit studied at the gymnasium until the age of seventeen and left school without a diploma; he was determined to pursue a career in music. He took music-lessons from a young age and wrote his first composition at the age of sixteen. From 1919 he studied piano and composition with Sem Dresden and Bernard Zweers, among others, at the Amsterdam Conservatoire. In 1924, he was the first student in the history of the Conservatoire to graduate cum laude in composition. Early on, and throughout his career, his orchestral works were performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, under the direction of prominent conductors such as Cornelis Dopper,3 Pierre Monteux and Eduard van Beinum.

He briefly taught harmony, theory and music analysis at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, but in 1927 he moved to Paris to broaden his musical horizons. Smit's ties with the Netherlands remained strong and he received several lucrative commissions. His music for the anniversary games of the universities of Leiden and Delft attracted considerable attention. He also wrote music for films, a new genre for an industry still in its infancy. A major success was his music for Charley Huguenot van der Linden's film Jonge Harten (‘Young Hearts’).

Following years of slowly and methodically building rapport with her board colleagues, Claudia Hampton was able to translate the social capital she had cultivated into increased soft power that she used in circumventing process obstacles, influencing and shaping policy, and effectively changing the organizational culture of the CSU Board of Trustees from within. This chapter details how Claudia Hampton used the power and influence that she had skillfully acquired in her earliest days on the board, including downplaying her race and playing to the gender norm of the day, to assist the CSU system in the implementation and expansion of its affirmative action program for students, faculty, and staff.

On May 23, 1979, in his final speech as the chair of the California State University Board of Trustees, Roy T. Brophy, a stocky-built white man who made millions in construction in Northern California, stood before the audi-ence gathered at the CSU Board offices in Los Angeles and closed his address with this: “A woman I have known and respected and loved for many years is our new chair. She will be known as the first black and the first woman chair of this or any other major university board of trustees. But she is more than that—she is a person with special sensitivity, special abilities, and special gifts; I am sure we will gain something in sharing them with her in the now future, Chair Dr. Claudia Hampton.” Brophy's somewhat clumsy attempt to mark the historic nature of the election of Dr. Claudia Hampton as just the second African American trustee and the first woman board chair for the California State University Board of Trustees takes on even greater importance when some months later on July 18, 1979, Dr. Hampton stood before the members of board to give her first address as chair. Hampton thanked her peers for the opportunity to serve as their leader and laid out her broad vision for the board during her term in office, never mentioning that she was the embodiment of history in the making. Hampton's silence on the significance of her race and gender in her appointment was characteristic of how she handled herself as a trustee and later as board chair when dealing with race and gender matters within the CSU system.

Ignace Lilien's home-town, Lemberg, known as Lviv in Ukrainian, and as Lwów in Polish, has a history of occupation by shifting powers. That is why the Germans had trouble establishing Lilien's true identity and how he survived the war with forged documents. He worked as a chemical engineer, but that didn't stop him from composing a large body of work. His life was as varied as his music, with influences ranging from Polish modernism to South American rhythms and timbres.

Lilien was born on 29 May 1897 in multicultural Lemberg, at that time an Austrian city where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews were the largest communities. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was a bustling metropolis; with an elegant new opera house, it was often referred to as ‘Little Vienna’. Around 1890, some Zionist organisations emerged, but the majority of the Jewish population was assimilated. Most spoke Polish, like the Lilien family, or German. Ignacy (his Polish name) was a linguistic prodigy. He expressed himself easily in German, French, Russian and English. His parents, Ernest Lilien and Emma Czeszer, had married in 1895. Ernest was the managing director of an agricultural bank and imported farm machinery from the United States; he moved there in 1913. A year later the couple divorced.

Ignace and a friend, who had been touring Europe by bicycle to visit all the significant museums, were in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the First World War. Travelling was too dangerous and on his mother's advice he remained in The Hague for the time being. She was now living in Geneva, remarried in 1916 to Conte Mario Gialina, an Italian architect. In 1919, still in the Netherlands, Ignace completed his First Symphony and he moved to Delft to study at the Technical University. In 1922, he obtained a degree in chemical engineering, and until his retirement in 1962 he was employed at the Chemical Products Factory (FCP, Fabriek voor Chemische Producten) in Pernis, near Rotterdam. He never returned to Lemberg.

Lilien arrived in the Netherlands with a rich musical heritage. He had studied piano with Theodor Pollak at the highly esteemed Ludwig Marek music school. Born in 1866 in Telč in southern Moravia, Pollak had studied in Vienna with such prominent teachers as Anton Door, Julius Epstein and Moriz Rosenthal. In Lemberg, Pollak's students were mainly from aristocratic and wealthy families.

Julius Hijman's career as a pianist centred on contemporary and Dutch music. Touring internationally, he presented the works of Dutch composers, and in the Netherlands he introduced new music from abroad, although his own compositions were not always appreciated by his audiences. He emigrated to America in 1939. The majority of his extensive output remains unpublished and awaits performance.

Julius Hijman was born on 25 January 1901 in Almelo, in the eastern Netherlands, at that time a town with a prosperous textile industry. His Jewish parents, the physician Leopold Hijman and Catherina Lion, were members of the local elite and had many friends among the captains of industry in the town. Julius and his younger sister, Renée, had piano lessons at an early age. He was talented and so went on to study privately with Marie Jannette Walen, a renowned concert pianist in Hilversum, some 70 miles from home – a long way to travel for a youngster. At sixteen he moved to Amsterdam, but stayed only six months before moving to Bussum, a small town near Utrecht, where he continued to develop his talent. In 1922, he became a member of the Trio Kwant from Utrecht, named after the flautist Cor Kwant, and returned to Amsterdam. This time he studied piano with Dirk Schäfer, whom he much admired, and composition and music theory with Sem Dresden.

In the 1920s, Hijman emerged as an ardent advocate of contemporary music. He formed a duo with the cellist Henk van Wezel. Then, in quick succession, both his parents died, and he left the Netherlands to pursue his studies with Paul Weingarten in Vienna. There he found the love of his life, Margarete Safir; the couple married in January 1926.

But Amsterdam was never far from his mind and in 1928 he and van Wezel devised their own concert series, focusing on contemporary music, including works by such composers as Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith and Kodály – and the audience attending a concert at De Kunstkring (the Amsterdam Art Society) promoted as a ‘Romantic Evening’ must have been surprised to hear music by Hindemith and Reger.

Relatively little is known about the life of Simon Gokkes. Most of his compositions were lost during the war, but in those that survived, his preference for Jewish and biblical themes is apparent. From a young age Gokkes worked as a choir and operatic conductor and he rescued a number of operas from oblivion.

Simon (Sim) Gokkes was born in Amsterdam on 21 March 1897. David Gokkes, his father, was a peddler from Blokzijl, a harbour town in the province of Overijssel, in the north-eastern part of the Netherlands. His mother, Rachel Rimini, gave birth to three sons: Jacob, Joseph and Simon. His musicality was apparent from an early age and he received singing lessons from the opera singer and conductor Ben Geijsel, and from Victor Schlesinger, cantor of the Rapenburg Synagogue in Amsterdam. How and when he began composing, or who taught him, is not clear. The fact is that in 1912, when he was only fifteen, his first compositions were performed by the choir of the Rapenburg Synagogue. As a teenager he conducted several choirs. In 1914 he replaced Schlesinger (who had left the country to take up the post of chief cantor in Manchester) as the conductor of a children's choir.

Gokkes attended the Amsterdam Conservatoire to study composition with Sem Dresden and graduated in 1919. He served for a brief time as the second Kapellmeister of the operetta company of Désiré Pauwels and Bart Kreeft, but military service brought an end to this engagement. In 1921, he founded the Amsterdamsche Korenschool (Amsterdam Choir School), aiming to renew the ‘Liedertafel’ style, an unpretentious choral style practised by male-voice choirs. The gatherings at which such music was sung were originally convivial occasions where the members sat around a table with refreshments, but the aims later became more artistic. Gokkes achieved considerable artistic success with this endeavour, according to a newspaper report from that time. He conducted the Santo Serviço, the choir of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, for many years and he continued to compose. In 1923, he married the pianist Rebecca Winnik, who had her own private music school. They had two children, David and Rachel.