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, premiered the day after 9-11 and released on CD and DVD by British record label Chandos.
In the last decade JacobTV’s boombox music, 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 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 Basta 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. Momentarily he is composing a video opera called ’The News’ about the credit crunch and other world events, while touring with his JacobTV Band and the multi media show ‘Cities Change The Songs Of Birds’.