Composer · b. 1951
Jacob ter Veldhuis
Biography
Jacob ter Veldhuis (born 1951), known as JacobTV, is a Dutch composer whose music brings concert composition into contact with rock, popular culture and recorded speech. He began as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music with Luctor Ponse and Willem Frederik Bon at the Groningen Conservatoire. After receiving the Netherlands Composition Prize in 1980, he became a full-time composer.
His melodic, emotionally direct language draws on sharply contrasted musical and cultural materials. His boombox works combine live instruments with sampled voices and sounds, often exploring the rhythms and inflections of everyday speech. Major projects include the video oratorio Paradiso, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. A three-day festival at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007 accompanied the release of a CD/DVD anthology of his work.