About

Jobina Tinnemans is a composer working at the nexus of electronics, classical music and contemporary art. She was born in Limburg in 1975 and from an early age was fascinated by both music and the visual arts, training as a pianist before deciding to become a student at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. As well as working in design she studied fashion and sound engineering and on graduating she was commissioned to create a sound art installation for the Dutch Rietveld pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

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. In 2007 she created Shakespeare And Hedgeshear, combining analogue sound processing, table tennis, hedge-trimming and excerpts from Shakespeare plays. Similarly, bold combinations of elements drawn from instrumental and electronic music and installation art have characterised her subsequent output. Étude (2012) brings together sports exercises, a soprano, viola and electronics, and a series of works ( Metro and Turner Piece in 2015 and Rivulet in 2016) explore a sound world made from the turning of pages.

Her work reached an international audience in 2013 when she was commissioned by the MATA festival in New York. She created Killing Time for an ensemble that plays virtual instruments with custom-designed interfaces; the performance also featured live knitting, the knitters using prepared needles, and a version of the work featured in Vogue New York’s 2016 fashion show. Close involvement with her community in Wales also led to a series of workshops in which local knitters tried out the techniques that would be deployed in New York. This mix of the local and the international has continued to be a feature of her practice, with Enduring Like A Tree Under The Curious Stars (2018) commissioned by the Landmark Trust for the re-opening of a historic house in the Brecon Beacons, with lyrics created from archived materials in the now extinct Gwenhywseg dialect and a collaboration with the Icelandic Kammerkór Sudurlands resulting in the song cycle A Seeress Prophecy (2016).

Jobina’s work has been supported by many funding agencies, including the PRSF and Arts Council England. 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. Her current work focuses on panoramic scores in which the contours of the landscape become notations, music for piano in collaboration with Vicky Chow and Eleonor Sandresky, installation commissions, and a large-scale music-theatre project.

(photo taken on Strumble Head, Pembrokeshire, during At the Next Port of Call rehearsal)