Pieter Johannes de Villiers (19 June 1924 – 18 May 2015) was a South African pianist, organist and composer.
[2] Pieter de Villiers obtained an undergraduate degree in 1942 in Classical Languages at the University of Pretoria.
[5] He accompanied South African classical musicians such as: Ceilia Wessels, Elizabeth de la Porte known as Betsy, Joyce Barker, Sarie Lamprecht, Hanli van Niekerk, Werner Nel and Mimi Coertse.
[6] In 2002 he received a special award from the ATKV in recognition of his lasting contribution to South Africa classical music over the years.
The Odeion String Quartet at the University of the Free State gave him an award for ‘Best Achievement in Classical Music’.
[7] The journalist Daniela Heunis of Rhodes University described him as follows, after an in-depth interview and research:[2]" He represented South African society before the 1994 elections.
De Villiers's music forms showed such a unity with the poetry that it had the character of folk songs.
De Villiers exclusively composed music for texts in Afrikaans, which made him inaccessible to most foreigners except speakers of Dutch.
When he started composing, he realized that the Afrikaans songs sung at the time were inaccessible to the man in the street, and he wanted to change that Quoting from Arthur Honegger, he said: "My inclination and my effort have always been to write music which would be comprehensible to the great massive listeners and at the same time sufficiently free of banality to interest genuine music lovers”.
An example is his settings of the Boerneef poems "Aandblom is 'n witblom", "Doer boe teen die rant", etc.