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Five Thoughts on Everything

Bright Shiny Things releases a recording of
music by Dutch composer Jobina Tinnemans

 

On 1 May 2020, Bright Shiny Things releases Five Thoughts on Everything (BSTC-0134), a world premiere recording featuring five works by the Dutch-born, UK-based composer, Jobina Tinnemans. Tinnemans first caught the attention of the media with her 2013 MATA Festival commission, Killing Time, scored for an amateur orchestra of twenty-five knitters and chamber ensemble. Her composition, Shakespeare and Hedgeshear, which consists of two table tennis teams and hedge trimmers, was the British entry at the 2014 ISCM World New Music Days. Since then she has composed over thirty-five works to a wide range of international commissions. In 2018, Tinnemans won an award from The Composers' Fund of the PRS Foundation. Work on the new album has been made possible by a grant from Arts Council England.

Jobina Tinnemans: 'Five Thoughts on Everything'. © 2020 Bright Shiny Things
Jobina Tinnemans: Five Thoughts on Everything.
© 2020 Bright Shiny Things

(From outer space ...) Midtone in G features mid-twentieth century synthesizers, which harken back to 1950s SciFi cult classics. The earth-bound piano stays fixed in our right ear as other sounds orbit in zero gravity. An inebriated brass band weightlessly gate-crashes the party.

(... we zoom in to Planet Earth ...) Edgard Varèse created Poème Électronique, the world's first mixed-media installation, for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. In 2018 Tinnemans was commissioned to write a work to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Varèse's iconic work. Varèsotto, Hinterland of Varèse, sets the narrative outside in a wide orchestral landscape with tiny, populated with detailed virtual sounds that come into focus as one listens.

(... getting closer, on wild coastlines ...) In Djúpalónsdóttir & Hellnarsson recordings of the South Iceland Chamber Choir vocalising on location in Djúpalónssandur and Hellnar are sculpted into virtual field instruments. The work is named after the scenic places at which it was performed, where the singers were becoming the sons and daughters of the land. A colony of kittiwake seagulls join in the singing of Kammerkór Sudurlands.

(... into the riparian zone, above and underwater ...) Dipping in and out of the water to soundscapes from the coast in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and Gulfoss waterfall in Iceland we experience The Shape Of Things Aquatic. This composition switches between abstract noise and pitched phrases. Tinnemans writes: 'As we go deeper we reach a profound stillness'.

(... to life in the deepest submarine levels) In Microbioism programmed beats often sound industrial rather than organic, but set in a new time and place they burst into life - they become heartbeats and pulses. The airy beats become the noise of starlings getting ready to roost, the panning of the pulses are schools of fish, and the virtual instruments return, this time as the calls of whales.

Jobina Tinnemans' work is located at the nexus of classical music, electronics and contemporary art. After classical piano training, she studied design in Eindhoven. She has lived intermittently in Amsterdam and London until permanently locating to a remote peninsula in Wales in 2007. Her work, which has been in international demand, has been staged on the Vogue catwalk in New York, on a glacier in Iceland and in a gigantic gasometer building in Germany. Whether Tinnemans composes music in cross-discipline or conventional notation, natural scenery is always at the heart of her music.

Posted 27 April 2020 by Paula Mlyn

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