. Bi ogr a ph y


Martijn Tellinga (1974, Netherlands) is a composer and performer of musical proposals and acoustical situations. His work renders an ongoing meditation on the rudimentary condition of the sonic arts. He aims to establish an artistic idiom that draws on the exploration of the workings of composition and performance as material for an autonomous practice in sound. A practice defined by attitude over means.

His sound works employ a variety of media and draw on a reduced formalist-seeming vocabulary, though are always responsive to intuitive and unforeseen interventions by performers and instruments. In his work, parameters of aural and spatial perception are closely connected. It focuses on the emergent field between intended listening and accidental hearing, on intuitive bending of (music) systems and on the expression of space by means of sound. It includes a wide variety of conceptual actions and chance operations.

He received a Master's degree in Sonology, studying with with Paul Berg and Kees Tazelaar. In 2008 he received a 2-year scholarship from the Netherlands Foudation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

He performed and exhibited his work in over 20 countries worldwide over the past years. He worked in residence at a number of institutes and collaborated with visual artists, video artists and filmmakers, a.o. with Dextro, Sami Kallinen and Jan Robert Leegte. He completed a short constructivist play for sound, light and objects in collaboration with James Beckett and James Fulkerson. He collaborated with renowned instrumentalists Jonny Axelsson, Robin Hayward and Jon Mueller and performed and interpreted works by Tudor, Nono, Xenakis, Raaijmakers, Lucier, McCall.

He is co-curator for the bi-weekly concertseries DNK-Amsterdam and radio maker for the Dutch radiostation De Concertzender. In 1999 he started the platform for experimental music Stichting Mixer. In 2010 he was guest lecturer on Contemporary Music and Sound Art at the ShenYang Conservatory of Music, China.

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