Recorded live at SUNY Fredonia for the ETHOS Newsound series on February 26, 2016.
The studio recording of Jesus is Coming performed by Akropolis can be heard on their 3rd album, The Space Between Us: https://akropolisquintet.org/music/the-space-between-us/
About the piece:
Composed in 2003, commissioned by the Dutch FPA, Jesus is Coming was inspired by the 9-11 trauma and the role of religion today and what humans do or don’t in the name of God. Is Jesus really coming? It’s about time… The composition is based on sound bytes from the streets of New York, like a small Salvation Army choir and an angry street evangelist on Times Square. The groove is based on baby talk by 2 toddlers: 18 months old Welmoed and 2 year old Amber. Jesus is Coming was originally scored for bass recorder quartet.
About the composer:
Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (Jacob ter Veldhuis, 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music with Luctor Ponse and Willem Frederik Bon at the Groningen Conservatoire. He received the Composition Prize of the Netherlands in 1980 and became a full time composer, who soon made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect.
The press called him the ‘Jeff Koons of new music’ and his ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal music reached a climax with the video Oratorio Paradiso based on Dante’s Divina Commedia. In the US they call him JacobTV. Sounds cool, just like his music, packed with slick sounds and quirky news samples. “I pepper my music with sugar,” he says. You can not accuse him of complex music, but some of his pieces are so intense, that people get freaked out by it. Or simply blown away. An anthology of his work on CD/DVD was released 2007 at a 3 day JacobTV festival at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.
JacobTV is considered an ‘outlaw’ in new music, whose work ‘makes many a hip-hop artist look sedate’ (Wall Street Journal). The self-proclaimed ‘avant pop composer’ won the first BUMA Classical Award in 2016 for the best selling classical export product from the Netherlands. With his continually updated reality opera THE NEWS he has been touring worldwide, his ballet music sounds from Moscow to Chicago.
JacobTV’s so-called Boombox repertoire, for live instruments with a grooving sound track based on speech melody, became internationally popular. With around 1000 world wide performances a year, JacobTV is nowadays one of the most performed European composers.