Arie Van Lysebeth was the President of the Jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition from 1996 to 2018. He took up the violin at the age of four. He completed his higher education at the Brussels Conservatory in music theory, bassoon, chamber music, and orchestral conducting. Following a competition, he was appointed bassoon soloist of the Belgian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, he came joint first in the Prague International Bassoon Contest. He also studied conducting under Bruno Maderna in Salzburg and under Pierre Boulez in Switzerland. Starting in 1970, he conducted the Flemish Chamber Orchestra, both in Belgium and abroad. As a guest conductor, he has appeared with the major Belgian orchestras as well as with symphony orchestras in the United States of America, Argentina, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. He has performed with many famous soloists, including Igor Oistrakh, José Van Dam, Murray Perahia, and Augustin Dumay. From 1995 to 2004 he was the regular conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Brussels Conservatory, where he taught chamber music for many years (1970-1994) and served as director (1994-2003). From 2004 to 2014, he was the artistic director of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.

Dutch-born Belgian composer of stage, orchestral, chamber, choral, and piano works; however, Frédéric Devreese is best known for his many memorable film scores and for his conducting. He received his first musical training from his father and then studied in Brussels (composition with Marcel Poot and conducting with René Defossez). He went on to study composition at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome and conducting at the Wiener Staatsakademie. At the age of nineteen, he received the Prize of the Town of Ostend for his Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1983, his Piano Concerto No. 4 was the compulsory work for the Queen Elisabeth Competition. Devreese has received several national and international awards, including the Prix Italia for his TV opera Willem van Saeftinghe, the Georges Delerue Award, the Plateau Music Award (twice) for his film music, and the Klara-Carrièreprijs (2006). As a conductor, he has made a number of recordings for the Naxos Anthology of Flemish Music, for which he was nominated Cultural Ambassador of Flanders in 1996-97.

André Laporte was was self-taught as a musician, quickly mastering the piano, clarinet and organ, while enthusiastically acquainting himself with modern music - as did his contemporary, Karel Goeyvaerts - through the radio programs of Paul Collaer, Louis De Meester, Vic Legley and David Van de Woestijne.

After completing secondary school he entered the Interdiocesan Higher Institute for Church Music (known as the Lemmens Institute) in Mechelen, where he studied under Edgard de Laet, Flor Peeters (organ) and Marinus De Jong (piano, counterpoint, fugue). Between 1953 and 1957 he was also a student at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he studied modern philosophy and musicology. He completed his studies in musicology with a comparative study of Ludus Tonalis and the Unterweisung im Tonsatz by Paul Hindemith. In 1953 he became a teacher of musical education and aesthetics at the Secondary Normal School of the St Thomas Institute (Middelbare Normaalschool van het Sint-Thomasinstituut) in Brussels. In this same period he composed his first works, folksong arrangements along the lines of Hindemith and Bartok, as well as a piano sonata and works for organ.

André Laporte became acquainted with the music of Schönberg, Stravinsky and Messiaen and was from 1960 to 1964 an annual participant at the Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, as well as the Kurse für Neue Musik in Cologne in 1964 and 1965. These courses gave him the opportunity to meet leading figures in the New Music movement (including Boulez, Maderna, Berio, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Kagel and Gielen). Like so many Belgian composers, he worked at the Belgian Radio (BRT, now VRT), first as a producer, later as a program coordinator, a production leader of the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra (1989) and ultimately as director of Artistic Ensembles (1993-1996), functions in which he was surrounded by such figures as D. Van de Woestijne, V. Legley, K. Goeyvaerts, L. De Meester, B. Buckinx, W. Westerlinck and L. Brewaeys. This position also gave him the chance to broadcast programs on “highlights of contemporary music” and “young Belgian performers”. Together with individuals from the Institute for Psycho-Acoustic and Electronic Music (IPEM), which had recently been set up by the BRT, he founded the SPECTRA work-group, which existed from 1963 to 1967.

André Laporte also won his spurs in music education. As early as 1968 he taught the New Techniques course at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels; this teaching position took on more solid form with his appointment as a teacher of music analysis, theory of musical form, harmony and counterpoint-fugue. In 1988 he became a teacher of composition, a position to which was added an appointment as teacher of composition at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo. Among his students may be mentioned Luc Brewaeys, Daniël Capelletti and Peter Swinnen.

In 1972, together with Herman Sabbe, he set up a new Belgian branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), of which he has remained the chairperson to this day.

André Laporte became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy for Sciences, Arts and Fine Art (1991), a member of the Flemish Music Board (Muziekraad voor Vlaanderen) and assistant chairperson of the Association of Belgian Composers (Unie van Belgische Componisten). He has won numerous prizes. Besides the Lemmens-Tinel prize, he won the Prix Italia in 1976 for his oratorio La vita non è sogno. The premiere of this work at the Flanders Festival in 1972 in Ghent attracted the attention of festival assistant Gerard Mortier, who as intendant at La Monnaie in Brussels would subsequently invite him to write an opera. His work has been performed both in Belgium and abroad; in particular, his Kafka opera, Das Schloss, was premiered at La Monnaie in 1986 and received its German premiere in the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken in 1991.

For many years now, the composer Claude Ledoux has explored the idea of ‘musical crossings’ as he attempts to reflect our fragmented world in his work. As a result, his oeuvre has been marked, not only by the interaction between composed music - which he studied with the likes of Pousseur, Rzewski, Ligeti, and Xenakis - and folk music, but also by the interaction of non-European music, which he has been attracted by since his teenage years, with new technology - reflecting his research in the Liège studios and in those of the Ircam in Paris. His recent works, accordingly, demonstrate this interest in the kind of ‘cultural porosity’ in which emotion arises from geographical encounters and connections between different historical periods, linking spirituality to the most obvious aspects of our material existence.

Fascinated by world music, Ledoux has travelled widely, particularly in the East, where he has made many trips to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and northern India ; these have fed in to his work. As a composer, he has received a number of awards, including a fellowship from the New York - based Civitella Ranieri Foundation. His compositions are performed frequently on every continent. In 2009, he composed the compulsory work for the semi-final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2012, he served as artistic director and composer in residence of the Ars Musica Festival. He has written a number of works with an Eastern dimension over recent years : Crossing Edges for erhu and orchestra, Echoes of Crossing Edges for the Shanghai Sinfonietta, and Euridice effacée, commissioned by the Muromachi Ensemble (Tokyo). In addition to composing instrumental works, 2016 sees him continue this journey, with new pieces for orchestra and instrumental soloist on Far Eastern themes as well as an epic vocal and instrumental work that will be premiered in Japan in the context of the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and Belgium.

Artistic Director (and a founding member) of the Ensemble LAPS, a relatively new ensemble that combines laptops with acoustic instruments, Ledoux has also written numerous articles on composition. He is Professor of Theoretical and Applied Analysis at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) and of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons / Arts2 and has also taught these subjects at seminars in the Universities of Campinas and of São Paulo (Brazil) and at the Shanghai Conservatory (China). He has been a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique since 2005.