Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (Jacob Ter Veldhuis, 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatory, where he was awarded the Composition Prize of the Netherlands in 1980. He became a full time composer and soon made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect. ‘I pepper my music with sugar,’ he says. Long queues at the box office of the four-day Jacob TV Festival in Rotterdam in 2001 already attested to his growing popularity. The NRC called him the ‘Jeff Koons of new music’ and his ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with the video oratorio Paradiso, with videos by Jaap Drupsteen, premiered the day after 9-11 and released on CD and DVD by British record label Chandos.
In the last decade JacobTV’s so called boombox works, for live instruments with a grooving sound track based on speech melody, became internationally popular.
Although JacobTV is one of the most performed European composers, he is still an outlaw in the established modern classical music scene, and was recently even accused of ‘musical terrorism’ after a premiere at the World Harp Congress in Amsterdam. According to the Wall Street Journal his newest work ‘makes many a hip-hop artist look sedate’. In 2007 the ‘box set trilogy, an anthology of his work with 12 hours of audio and video, was released by Bastamusic.com and presented at a 3 day JacobTV mini festival at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. JacobTV lives in the Dutch country side and is momentarily composing a video opera called ’The News’ about the credit crunch and other world events, while touring with his JacobTV Band with the multi media show ‘Cities Change The Songs Of Birds’.
‘Stylistically, Jacob ter Veldhuis is hard to pin down. His classical side is a lush combination of post minimalism and romanticism. While he was working on integrating rock, jazz, and pop culture into his music from one side, he was turning away from high modernism on the other’.
Sequenza 21
‘JacobTV is preoccupied with American media and world events and draws raw materials from those sources. His work possesses an explosive strength and raw energy combined with extraordinarily intricate architectural design’.
Limor Tomer, former curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, now Executive Producer of Music at WNYC.
‘JacobTV is one of the most intriguing and engaging European composers of today. His control of energy and momentum, in fact, is one of his music's greatest strengths. His fast-moving pieces have an exciting sense of drive and purposefulness, and his more meditative pieces have a logic and quiet intensity that keep them from being meandering or static. TV’s music is emotionally direct, and he possesses an authentic lyrical gift that never sounds like rehashed Romanticism. His music is marked by a gentle optimism that reflects his deliberate rejection of what he perceives as the negativity of much modern music.’*
Stephen Eddins, critic
Main works: The Rainbow-, Tallahatchie- and Goldrush- concertos, the video oratorio Paradiso, Mountain Top, the 2nd Pianoconcerto ‘Sky Falling’, ‘NOW’, String Quartets 1,2 & 3, Drei Stille Lieder, Diverso il Tempo, Laws of Science, Grab it!, Heartbreakers, Buku, Jesus is coming, May this Bliss never end, the Body of your Dreams, Les Soupirs de Rameau, Cities change the Songs of Birds, the Postnuclear Winterscenarios, piano trio Nivea Hair Care Styling Mousse, Cheese Cake, Lipstick.
JacobTV was performed by The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Tokyo City Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Russian State Academy, the Düsseldorf Symfoniker, the Metropole Orchestra, and by soloists such as Branford Marsalis, James Galway, Evelyn Glennie, Ronald Brautigam, Arno Bornkamp, Kevin Gallagher, Margaret Lancaster, Claron McFadden, Thomas Allen, Andrew Russo and ensembles like Het Nederlands Kamerkoor, Electra, Electric Kompany, Ethel, Fulcrumpoint, Quasar, E.A.