This study has the church musician and composer Willem Vogel as a point of reference. His life and works reflect the developments in Dutch Protestant liturgical music in the second half of the twentieth century. Conversely, he himself partly determined the course of these developments through his work as a practicing church musician, his involvement in church music policy in the Dutch Reformed Church in particular, and above all through the relentless stream of compositions with which he enriched Dutch Protestant liturgical music for sixty years. The question of the influence of Vogel's work on the sound idiom of Dutch Protestant liturgical music is central to this research. Archival and literature research are the most important methodological pillars of this research. The dissertation is divided into six chapters. The first three are devoted to Willem Vogel's biography, to the development of his thinking on liturgical music and to the gradually changing sound idiom of his compositions. Chapter four describes Willem Vogel's complete oeuvre: its structure, composition, characteristics and focal points. Subsequently, a part of that oeuvre, the stanza melodies, is musically analyzed in chapter five. This analysis visualizes the typical properties of the sound idiom of Willem Vogel's compositions. The sixth and final chapter is dedicated to the place of Willem Vogel's work in the broader context of both Dutch Protestant liturgical music and social and cultural developments in the second half of the twentieth century. It is mainly the quantity of Vogel's work – his extensive oeuvre, his important policy influence and his long working life – that has had a qualitative influence on the sound idiom of Dutch Protestant liturgical music. In the interplay between rhythm, melody and harmony, the melody is central to Vogel's work. The harmony arises from the melodic course and the rhythm often has a structuring function. However, it is mainly the close relationship between word and tone that characterizes Vogel's music and ...