About

Jobina Tinnemans is a composer working at the nexus of electronic and classical music and has been fascinated by both music and the visual arts from an early age, training as a classical pianist before deciding to study composition at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. On graduating Cum Laude she was commissioned to create the sound art installation Chat/OFF/Course (2001) in collaboration with NL Architects and the NAI for the Dutch Rietveld Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

In 2007 she created Shakespeare Und Heckenschere, combining table tennis, hedge-clipping and excerpts from Shakespeare plays, for the extreme sonic environment of a gasometer in Oberhausen, Germany. The work was selected for the 2014 ISCM World Music Days in Wroclaw, Poland, making this a second appearance on the ISCM World Music Days after her radiophonic work Dr. NAUT (2008) was broadcast on ABC Radio during the festival in Sydney, Australia, in 2010. 

Also in 2007, after a number of years living and working in Eindhoven, Amsterdam and London, she moved to a remote headland in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in order to concentrate on making music. This encounter with a landscape dominated by the rhythms of the weather, the seasons and the sea has been the inspiration for all her subsequent work.

Tinnemans’ work reached an international audience in 2013 when she was commissioned by the prestigious MATA festival in New York. Tinnemans created Killing Time (2013) for ensemble and additional performers on virtual instruments with sounds from the natural world, she coined field instruments, in which custom-designed stringed interfaces are using their strings to determine time rather than pitch. A version of the work featured in Vogue New York 2016 gala fashion show. 

Similar bold combinations of elements we can find in Étude (2012) created for the Cultural Olympiad UK, bringing together sports exercises, a soprano, viola and electronics; in a series of works such as Metro and Turner Piece (2015), commissioned by the Apartment House ensemble, as well as Page Turner Études Nº 1-3 (2017), commissioned by pianist Eleonor Sandresky, Tinnemans explores a sound world from within the deconstructed medium of sheet music itself. Her panoramic scores Rivulet (2016) and Landmannalaugar (2017), commissioned by the Lithuanian ensemble Synaesthesis, and Hraun (2020), for the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect, are now bundled in the ongoing series of Panoramic Books, with performances of Nºs VIII – IX (both 2025) by Kathryn Williams at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and at KM28, Berlin, and with recordings by Nordic Affect, planned for late 2025. 

For the royal re-opening of Llwyn Celyn in the Brecon Beacons, the Landmark Trust commissioned Jobina for the choral diptych Enduring Like A Tree Under The Curious Stars (2018), which uses the now extinct Gwenhywseg dialect sourced from the National Library of Wales, for its distinct sound to be heard through the valley as it did at the initial medieval opening in 1250. Taking vocalisations back through time even further, in the song cycle Verisimilitude (2016), performed by Icelandic Kammerkór Sudurlands, Jobina explores wordless calls of our natural world, set on-location in the outdoors on the Snaefellsness peninsula and on its glacier, to enable the natural soundscape to play their part.

The piano piece Salomé (2019) composed for Vicky Chow for her residency at John Zorn’s The Stone, NYC, brings Tinnemans’ work back to its initial core, followed by Seven Sisters (2020) for piano. These works are themed around the identities of the female legends mentioned in the titles. In 2020 her first album, Five Thoughts On Everything, was released on the New York-based label Bright Shiny Things and was widely reviewed and broadcast, reviewed as ‘a disc to die for’ by The Whole Note.

The British National Museum for Science And Media commissioned Gramophony (2020-21), consisting of an ensemble of four manipulable sound sources and variable tempi, for their first dedicated sound exhibition Sonic Boom. This composition emphasising on environmental awareness was based on the natural soundscape on Strumble Head, Wales, the setting for At The Next Port Of Call (2021) for trumpet, tuba, seascape and lighthouse, in which the latter is utilised as a giant metronome, furthering the theme of listening to our natural soundscape.

In her music for media, Tinnemans wrote a 1930-50s Golden Age of Cinema-style soundtrack for big band for the radio series Dingus (2022), created by the playwright Mike Cooter; it was nominated for an ARIAS award a few months later. She recently completed Sub Strata (2023), performed by the Riot Ensemble, for Berlin and LA-based Pusher Music.

The Vaughan Williams Foundation and The Hinrichsen Foundation supported Tinnemans with Vanitas (2023) for string quartet, performed by the Frankland ensemble and released on the album Vanitas & Seven Sisters (2024) with the latter work performed by Fidan Aghayeva-Edler, which received a ‘recommend listen’ in Prospect Magazine #73. 

In collaboration with the Prize Papers Project at The National Archives, London, and the University of Oldenburg, which started in 2023, Jobina Tinnemans is working on a chamber opera planned for completion in 2026.

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