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One on One with Jacob TV
Dutch “avant-pop” composer Jacob TV (aka Jacob Ter Veldhuis, b. 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatoire, where he was awarded the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. During the ’80s he made a name for himself with melodious compositions. “I pepper my music with sugar,” he says. Long queues at the box office for the four-day Jacob TV Festival in Rotterdam in 2001 already attested to the growing popularity of this composer, both in the Netherlands and abroad. His Goldrush Concerto, the Third String Quartet and several of his so-called boombox pieces like Grab It! became hits, inspiring the work of various choreographers. Early in his career, TV stood up to what he called the “washed-out avant-garde,” which made him a controversial figure in certain circles. He strives to liberate new music from its isolation by employing a direct—at times provocative—idiom that spurns “the dissonant,” which in TV’s view reflects a devalued means of musical expression. His “coming-out” as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with the video oratorio Paradiso. In May 2007, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a three-day festival celebrating his music in New York City. On April 29, 2008, PMP hosted an interview with Jacob TV and NewMusicBox.org editor Frank J. Oteri. What follows is a selection of Jacob’s statements about his music and career.
PITCH BLACK: The Music of Jacob ter Veldhuis, an evening-length multimedia production combining video installation by Tobin Rothlein and choreography by Amanda Miller, performed at the Whitney Museum of Art. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
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I grew up in the ’50s. Europe was a grey place—postwar—and everything that was colorful at that time came from this country: Walt Disney, chewing gum, big cars, Elvis Presley… So I grew up with that. This was the Promised Land, so to speak—it was so inspiring. It took a long time for me to find my way as a composer. I think it took me until I was about 40 years old to find a style of my own. At that time I saw a documentary about Chet Baker, the late jazz troubadour who lived his last years in Amsterdam. One of the reasons he lived there was because it was easy to get drugs (and it still is quite easy), so he lived a very tragic life, and he died very young by falling out of a hotel room window. Shortly before he died he was interviewed. This interview was almost impossible because he couldn’t talk, he was so drugged out. But still, I used voice samples from his interview, and it became a trio for boom box with voice samples of Chet Baker, cello, and piano. So for me this was a discovery because suddenly I realized something which is not completely new, because 20 years earlier an American composer, Scott Johnson, used speech in music as a source of inspiration. And of course Steve Reich did that in pieces like City Life or Different Trains, in his own way. But for me, I was looking for authentic emotion; I was looking for people in very emotional situations to use in my work. I felt like a photographer, making pictures of this world around us, and I realized, “Okay, I can focus on any kind of subject”—political, religious, or whatever. American television is a very fascinating source of inspiration to me. To give an example, an episode of the Jerry Springer Show became the source of a jazz suite I wrote ten years ago called Heartbreakers. I was so taken by the way people let themselves go in front of an audience of millions, shamelessly. That is impossible in Europe, because people are more reserved, in a way. TV commercials are also so different in this country than they are in Europe. I was fascinated when I saw a TV ad about an “Electronic Pro”—a kind of belt that produces 3,000 contractions in just ten minutes—and you get a perfect body from that. You don’t have to do anything; you can wash dishes while you wear this. And it was amazing the way this product was advertised, even in Europe. I really love this commercial, so I tried to exaggerate the excitement even to a higher point in a piece called, The Body of Your Dreams. It’s been performed by an American pianist, Andrew Russell, a bodybuilder himself. I compose by intuition. I have the source material; I pick out all the samples that I like; I put all the samples under the keys. All 88 keys of my electronic keyboard have one sample—can be a word, can be a syllable, or even a complete sentence—then I start playing around with this. I just press these keys, and I get a groove, and the groove is so beautiful… I push on the record button and record the groove. That’s how I start working—it’s a trial and error. Although I’m a classically trained composer, I don’t want to see music at all; I don’t want to see any notes. I compose whole pieces, and then decide, “Okay, how should we do the instrumentation of the brass? What will the horns do? The trumpets…?” And so on. I have to work like that because I’m not a rational person. No, I couldn’t live like that. No, I was bad at mathematics, but good at language, so I’m interested in this approach. If I was a painter, I’d use a lot of different colors of paint and experiment with colors on the canvas.
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