Sem Dresden

[2] On the strength of a promising piano piece, he was sent to study composition and conducting under Hans Pfitzner at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin between 1903–5 and was there encouraged to take an interest in Impressionist music.

Then until 1926 he directed the nine-member Madrigal Society, which earned an international reputation for its painstaking performances of Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary choral music, and afterwards, from 1928 to 1940, a larger chamber choir in Haarlem.

The compositions written after Dresden returned from Berlin show largely French influences, as in the four suites for wind and piano composed for the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Sextet (1912–14) and the Sonata for Flute and Harp (1918).

In the Chorus tragicus (1927), to a text by Vondel concerning the fall of Jerusalem, the Chorus symphonicus (based on Biblical psalms, 1943–56), the oratorio based on Gustave Flaubert's St Antoine (written for the 1953 international congress of church music in Augsburg), Psalm 84 (1954) and St Joris (1955), Dresden emerged as his country’s leading twentieth-century composer of oratorios and festive choral music.

The biographical material is largely gathered from the articles in the Dutch Wikipedia, the Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland (Den Haag 1979) and at the Netherlands Music Institute.