Joseph Victor Marie Ryelandt was born in Bruges, into a wealthy bourgeois family, for whom culture, tradition, and the Roman Catholic religion mattered.

Eventually he persuaded his mother to let him show some of his compositions to Edgar Tinel, at the time one of Belgium's most esteemed musicians.

This fellow has written sonatas, trios, variations, duos …" His mother relented, and from 1891 to 1895 Joseph studied with Tinel.

In addition, he had a family to take care of, for in 1899 he had married Marguerite Carton de Wiart (1872–1939), and the children had come thick and fast, eight in all.

He felt compelled to find a position, and in 1924 he was appointed director of the Municipal Conservatory of Bruges, a function that came with a teaching load.

Also, he ceased composing oratorios, which he considered his major works, but that was at least as much due to the death of Charles Martens (1866–1921),[1] the librettist or co-librettist of three of his oratorios and a number of his cantatas, the tireless propagandist of his music, his literary, philosophical and theological interlocutor, and above all his friend, whose name he never mentioned without preceding it with "my good friend" or similar expression.

His life was busy: he took on a counterpoint course at the Ghent Conservatory, he organized a highly successful concert series in his own conservatory, he was often asked to sit on juries of music examinations and competitions, he was involved in the Queen Elisabeth Musical Foundation, which organized the Eugène Ysaÿe Competition, etc.

He was asked to compose the Te Deum for the centenary of the independence of Belgium; he was made a member of the Belgian Academy in 1937 and a baron in 1938.

World War II and the miseries and worries it entailed caused his composition to slow down still further: he wrote nothing at all in 1940– 42, and only a few chamber music works between 1943 and 1948,[2] when he ceased composing altogether.

On August 31, 1943 the City Council finally parted with "this upstanding artist", granted him the title of "honorary director", and drafted Renaat Veremans as his successor.

But as all these decisions were taken while Bruges, like all of Belgium, was occupied by Germany, the post-war City Council reversed them and re-instated Ryelandt on September 30, 1944.

[3] He devoted his retirement to literature, writing poetry (including a number of translations into French of his favorite Dutch-language poet Guido Gezelle) and reading classics, many with strong religious contents: the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, Joost van den Vondel and Paul Claudel, as well as Dante, Pascal, and Teresa of Ávila.

But he was not a dour man: he was sociable and had a sense of humor, from when he was a child—his mother mentions the occasional "crazy gaiety" of the young Joseph—until his old age, when he wrote a ditty in which the moon (la lune, feminine in French) scolds the indelicacy of the scientists trying to take pictures of her derrière (meaning both 'far side' and 'backside').

However, Ryelandt was highly critical of atonality, claiming that the modernists' "empty game of sound combinations brings us no interior enrichment at all," and that the value of works like Honegger's "unforgettable" Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher lay chiefly in their tonal passages.

The following words from the preface to his Notices sur mes oeuvres sum up what really mattered to him: "I think … I can say that I have not been a useless servant of art.

Ryelandt's national and international reputation was made primarily by his five great oratorios, which were all performed in Belgium, and some also in The Netherlands, France, and Canada.

The four that remain are: His religious vocal music further comprises seven cantatas, a Te Deum, a number of short motets, and two theatrical works, the mystery play La Parabole des Vierges 'The Parable of the Virgins' and the "musical drama" Sainte Cécile.

Froyen lists about forty compositions, including 12 piano sonatas—the fourth dedicated to Vincent d'Indy[16]— and two sonatines, six nocturnes, two volumes of preludes, three suites, etc.

Most of the Dutch texts he set were by Guido Gezelle, who, notwithstanding their failed collaboration on the De XIV stonden oratorio, greatly inspired him.

As he held music to be a language sui generis, as his vocal music is set to texts in a variety of languages (his oratorios to Latin, Dutch, German and French texts, and he had some English and Italian translations made), it is clear he aspired to be an international artist.