Jacob TV: Grab It!
Hi, I’m Stefanie, and I want to tell you something about Jacob TV and the piece “Grab it!” Jacob TV is a well-known Dutch composer. He started as a rock musician in a band, and continued in composition and electronic music. A big part of his work consists of pieces with soundtrack. He calls them the boombox works. He’s written almost 40 of these pieces. In the boombox works, he uses soundtrack with mainly speech and movie sounds. In these pieces, he shows his fascination for the human speech. As he says himself: “The origin of music lies in spoken word.” In further pieces, he finds the most fragments in American media, for example in interviews, political speeches, or documentaries, like in the piece “Grab it!” In this piece, he uses conversations with prisoners in America with a life sentence, the hopelessness of their situation comes forth in the use of rough language, and shouting and screaming at each other. Jacob takes the fragments, and through repetition, he creates intriguing patterns, which form the basis for the melodic lines of the solo instrument, here the bassoon. The soundtrack and the lines of the solo instruments get completely intertwined. I like the music of Jacob TV a lot because of the special mixture between popular music, jazz, and modern compositional writing. Also, all the pieces have vibrant energy and a special use of rhythm and speech. You can’t easily categorize his special way of writing. He tells stories and brings forth emotions in his own individual style. “Grab it!” feels like a long artistic rap. Once you start listening, you get into the flow of rhythm and speech. The piece doesn’t feel heavy or depressive because of this difficult situation of the prisoners, it talks also about hope. It says, “grab your chances, grab it!”
Stefanie Liedtke
