About

Jobina Tinnemans is a composer working at the nexus of classical music and contemporary art. She was born in Limburg, the Netherlands, in 1975 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 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.

Also 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. 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, as well as in a series of works such as Metro and Turner Piece (2015) commissioned by the Apartment House ensemble; her panoramic scores Rivulet (2016) and Landmannalaugar (2017) commissioned by the Lithuanian ensemble Synaesthesis and Hraun (2020) for the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect; and Page Turner Études Nº 1-3 (2017), commissioned by pianist Eleonor Sandresky, which explore a sound world from within the deconstructed medium of sheet music itself.

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, 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. 

For the royal re-opening of Llwyn Celyn, a historic house in the Brecon Beacons, the Landmark Trust commissioned Jobina for the choral diptych Enduring Like A Tree Under The Curious Stars (2018), referencing musical styles present during the opening in 1250 and the re-opening in our contemporary times. She researched in the archives of the National Library of Wales for materials to create the lyrics in the now extinct Gwenhywseg dialect to resonate its distinct sound once more through the valley as it did at the initial medieval opening. Taking vocalisations back through time even further, in the song cycle Verisimilitude (2016), composed for the Icelandic Kammerkór Sudurlands, Jobina explored the language of our natural world and this was the first time she set a composition in the outdoors, to enable the natural soundscape to play their part, here in the majestic Snaefellsnes peninsula and on its glacier.

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. The British National Museum for Science And Media commissioned Gramophony (2020-21), comprising of an ensemble of four manipulable sound sources and variable tempi, for their first dedicated sound exhibition Sonic Boom. This composition 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.

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 Hinrichsen Foundation and Vaughan Williams Foundation are currently supporting Tinnemans in creating Vanitas (2024) for string quartet. Jobina Tinnemans publishes with Donemus Music Publishing.

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