Harmen was born in Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands, where he still lives. In his life, the church has always been an important element; he has grown up with the Bible, and now a lot of his compositions are based on faith and texts from the Bible.
At seven years, his piano lessons with Simon Stelling. After some time, composing started to become a part of the piano lessons, which greatly appealed to him. This got stronger when he took music lessons with Cornelis van Dis in secondary school (VWO) at the Driestar College in Gouda. The lessons made him love music even more, with as a highlight the compositions he wrote for this.
After secondary school, he studied Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft for a year and did the pre-bachelor Classical Music at the Utrechts Conservatory, with composition as main subject, which he continued the following year in the Bachelor Classical Music. He's now in the third year of his studies of composition with Caroline Ansink and Anne-Maartje Lemereis.
