Rudolf Escher (Amsterdam, 1912 – De Koog, Texel, 1980) was a Dutch composer and music theorist who also wrote poetry and essays on the arts. His output includes chamber and orchestral works, vocal pieces and one electronic composition, and he is remembered for his thinking about form and structure in twentieth-century music.
Part of his childhood was spent in the Dutch East Indies, where his geologist father gave him his first piano lessons. After the family returned to the Netherlands he studied in Leiden and then at the Toonkunst Conservatoire in Rotterdam under Willem Pijper. His First piano sonata premiered in 1935, and in the following years he became known as an essayist.
The bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 destroyed many of his early scores. During the war he composed Musique pour l'esprit en deuil, a work that brought him considerable recognition. After the war he wrote on art and music for the press and published poetry, and in the 1950s he explored serial music, though Pierre Boulez's methods did not fully convince him. From 1964 to 1977 he was a lecturer at the University of Utrecht.
His legacy lives on in the foundation bearing his name, which supports young composers, and in his correspondence with Peter Schat, published in 1992, which documents the aesthetic debates of his era.