Jacob Hieronymus
ComposerFilm & performance directorCreative producer

Jacob Hieronymus

A multidisciplinary artist working across contemporary classical music, contemporary dance, theatre, live performance and video art.

Born in Moscow, 1974 Living and working in Jerusalem since 2022

Jacob Hieronymus at the piano
Jacob Hieronymus

Statement

Hieronymus’s work explores the ongoing transformation of collective consciousness and the complex relationship between the physical reality of time and sound, image and text.

In dialogue with contemporary physics, psychology and philosophy, he creates polystylistic structures where intellectual and emotional perceptions intertwine.

Continuing the synesthetic tradition, his compositions merge auditory, visual and spatial dimensions into multisensory experiences.

Across concert music, video and performance, he fuses acoustic and visual textures into forms that move towards the harmonic resolution of dissonance.


In progress

Sonification of Primes

Mathematical art — generative audiovisual instrument

An ongoing project in which the arithmetic of prime numbers is made audible. Quadratic residues modulo a prime — the numbers that are squares when counted round that prime — sort the steps of a microtonal ladder into two families, and the same arithmetic sets the form: the number of scenes is itself a prime, and the residues fix their order. Pitch, sequence and proportion all descend from a single number.

The work began as a system written in Python and SuperCollider and now runs as a single generative application, played live. It is now being built out for performance: the instrument takes the violin as its input — a fretless neck meeting a microtonal ladder without retuning — and reads live biosignals, the pulse setting the tempo, so that arithmetic and the body share one score. The strip below is the instrument’s own screen, drawn by the same arithmetic as the sound. This is work at the meeting of art and science: the mathematics is not an illustration of the piece, it is the material the piece is made of.

Instrument display: gold diamonds with tails and cyan marks on a dark lattice Instrument display: a dense gold sawtooth line over a black lattice, with reference lines Instrument display: rows of orange discs gathering low on a dark green field Instrument display: a rust sawtooth line with red crosses on a pale sage field
The instrument’s display — four scenes from one three-minute run
Role
Jacob Hieronymus — concept, composition and software
Context
Art Research Program, Musrara — the Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, Jerusalem
Status
Running; in development, 2026

Selected works

012024–2026

The Beginning of Coming Back

Video performance

Still from The Beginning of Coming Back
The Beginning of Coming Back, 2024–2026

A video performance merging original music, contemporary dance and cinematic imagery filmed across Israel — from burnt forest and desert to the sea and the cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The work explores the nonlinear matter of time within historical circumstances that reveal the fragile continuity of human experience.

The score was first performed in Riga in September 2020, between the first and second waves of the pandemic, at a biennial then preoccupied with imagining possible futures. That recording is the soundtrack of this film, shot in Israel between 2024 and 2026.

Creative team
Jacob Hieronymus — music & artistic direction
Ekaterina Hieronymus — choreography
Chaya Vaynshteyn — camera
Pavel Blumkin — editing director
Wolfgang Messing — artistic adviser
Watch
TrailerFull film on request
022022

Piece for Harpsichord

Composition for solo harpsichord — studio recording

Recording session, Piece for Harpsichord
Piece for Harpsichord, 2022

A contemporary composition for solo harpsichord that takes a Mozartian model as its point of departure, translating the elegance and balance of the Viennese classical form into a modern study of proportion, texture and temporal sensibility.

Created in cooperation with the Faculty of Historical and Contemporary Performance at the Moscow Conservatory, the project bridges historical authenticity with contemporary perception. Performed by Maria Kurtinina on a two-manual harpsichord after a Couchet original — the work explores the fragile architecture of sound, where repetition and resonance reveal subtle transformations of time and emotion.

Creative team
Jacob Hieronymus — music, recording and production
Maria Kurtinina — performance
Instrument
Two-manual harpsichord after a Couchet original of 1680, built by Dmitry Belov, 2011
Recorded at
Cultural Centre ‘Pokrovsky Gates’, Moscow
Listen
SoundCloud
032021

Approved by the Future

with Wolfgang Messing, for his solo exhibition Re-Fake

Sound installation within a painting exhibition

Installation view, Re-Fake, Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam
Re-Fake, Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam

The work explores the dialogue between sound and image, where paintings — oil on canvas — resonate with a fifteen-minute audio composition: a fragment of radio transmission intercepted from a distant future.

Conceived as both an installation and a visual-acoustic reflection, the piece examines how matter, memory and imagination intertwine when the borders between seeing and hearing, past and future, begin to dissolve. The music unfolds as a poetic signal — simultaneously archival and prophetic — while Messing’s paintings act as visual condensations of that imagined broadcast. Sound and paint carry the same broadcast in two materials.

Creative team
Wolfgang Messing — concept and paintings
Jacob Hieronymus — music and sound design
Venue
Stigter Van Doesburg Gallery, Amsterdam
Listen
SoundCloud
042020

Spiralis

A concert of the Association of Composers ‘Spiralis’

Concert production and premiere

Spiralis performance, Baltā nakts festival, Riga
Baltā nakts festival, Riga, 2020

For the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, during the Baltā nakts festival in September 2020, Hieronymus organised and produced a concert of the Association of Composers ‘Spiralis’ — contemporary classical and experimental music inside a multidisciplinary programme that connected sound, performance and visual art across Riga’s urban spaces.

He shared the programme with the Latvian composers Georgs Pelēcis and Platon Buravicky. It was here that his own cycle The Beginning of Coming Back was first performed; the recording made that night became the soundtrack of the film.

Role
Jacob Hieronymus — organiser, producer and composer
Programme
Georgs Pelēcis · Platon Buravicky · Jacob Hieronymus
Performed by an ensemble of Latvian musicians
Venue
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2), Baltā nakts festival, Riga
052019

Indumentum

Multimedia performance and exhibition

Indumentum poster, KUNSTKAPEL, Amsterdam
Indumentum, KUNSTKAPEL, Amsterdam, 2019

A multimedia performance and exhibition presented in Amsterdam, merging sound, painting and photography within a single immersive environment. Created in collaboration with Maarten Kools, Wolfgang Messing, Anastasia Vledouts and KLVDGY, the project explores transformation and the dialogue between media, and between historical and present-day musical languages.

Hieronymus, KLVDGY and Anastasia Vledouts performed Suite for Flutes and Electronics — a composition for baroque flutes, live processing and a vintage Roland modular synthesiser. The sound interacts with Kools’s photographs and Messing’s paintings, forming a meditative continuum where vibration, light and material form merge into a shared perceptual space.

Creative team
Maarten Kools — photography, installation and direction
Wolfgang Messing — painting
Jacob Hieronymus — music and performance
KLVDGY — modular synthesis
Anastasia Vledouts — baroque flutes
Venue
KUNSTKAPEL, Amsterdam
Listen
SoundCloud
062019

Sketches for Cinema and Theater

Cycle of instrumental sketches — computer realisation

Sketch notation on a blackboard
Sketches for Cinema and Theater, 2019

A cycle of short, narrative-based instrumental pieces — ‘musical theatre in miniature’. Each fragment suggests a scene, a gesture or an emotional transition, evoking the language of cinema and theatre through music alone.

The cycle exists as a computer realisation: sketches rather than finished recordings, made to carry the musical imagery itself. It was presented in that form at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music in Riga.

Creative team
Jacob Hieronymus — composition and production
Shown at
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, Riga
Listen
SoundCloud
072017

Structures

for the exhibition Coup de Foudre, marking the centenary of De Stijl

Sound installation

Exterior of Maison van Doesburg, Meudon
Maison van Doesburg, Meudon

A sound installation created for the exhibition Coup de Foudre, dedicated to the centenary of De Stijl — the Dutch avant-garde movement founded by Theo van Doesburg in 1917.

The work reinterprets the aesthetic of spatial balance and reduction through sound, transforming architectural proportion into resonance. Constructed as an environment of pure frequencies and intervals, it evokes the utopian clarity of form that defined the De Stijl vision — harmony achieved through structure itself.

Creative team
Jacob Hieronymus — composition and production
Venue
Maison van Doesburg, Meudon (Paris)

Practice

Hieronymus’s practice moves between contemporary classical music, contemporary dance, theatre, live performance, video art and art-and-science — as composer, as director and as the producer who assembles them. His work has been presented at the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, at KUNSTKAPEL and Stigter Van Doesburg in Amsterdam, at Maison van Doesburg in Meudon, and at the Cultural Centre ‘Pokrovsky Gates’ in Moscow.

He takes commissions for composition, score and sound design — film, theatre, dance, advertising, games — and collaborates on installation and performance.

Contact jacob@jacobhieronymus.com
Jerusalem, Israel SoundCloud YouTube