Bernard Hélène Joseph van Dieren was a Dutch composer, critic, author, and writer on music, much of whose working life was spent in England. He was largely self-taught, though he spent 1912 in Europe where he met the composers Busoni and Schoenberg. His early contact with the music world was as a musical correspondent for several European newspapers and periodicals. During the First World War he was for a short time involved in secret service in the Netherlands, as a cypher expert in the Intelligence Department.