Joël Bons was born in Amsterdam in 1952. He studied guitar and composition at the Sweelinck Conservatory and visited the summer courses of Franco Donatoni in Siena and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. In Freiburg he continued his studies with Brian Ferneyhough. Bons composed chamber and ensemble works such as Attacca, Variations, Sextet, Tour, Bref, Draught, First Edition, Feeststuk, Flard and Tour à Tour. His music has been performed by the Asko Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, Radio Chamber Orchestra and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1980 Joël Bons co-founded the Nieuw Ensemble. He has been reponsable for virtually all programming of this group. Besides he organised festivals such as Complexity? (1990), Rules and Games (1995), Improvisations (1996), the multicultural Festival of Plucked Instruments (1998), and The Refined Ear (on microtonality, 2002). As artistic adviser Bons has worked for the Holland Festival, Gaudeamus, ISCM, Donemus, Rotterdam Arts Council and the Concertgebouw. Bons supervised the cd recordings of the Nieuw Ensemble and produced a solo cd by violinist Irvine Arditti. Together with film director Frank Scheffer he made a television documentary on Boulez’ Eclat.

In 1988 Bons visited World Music Days in Hong Kong. He then traveled through China where he became acquainted with a new generation of Chinese composers. In 1991 the Nieuw Ensemble presented these remarkable talents to western audiences, which marked the international breakthrough of new Chinese music. In 1998 Joël Bons and the Nieuw Ensemble were awarded the Prince Bernhard Fund Music Prize for their ‘markedly lively and adventurous programming which can be described as groundbreaking, both in the literal and figurative senses of the word’.

From 2002 Bons did artistic research in the Near East and Central Asia and founded the Atlas Ensemble, a unique chamber orchestra uniting musicians from Asia and Europe. For his work with the Atlas Ensemble he was granted the prestigious Amsterdam Prize for the Arts 2005. The same year Joël Bons was appointed lector/guest professor composition at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, where he is now artistic director of the composition department. At the request of the Festival d’Automne à Paris Bons was curator of the music programme of ‘Scène artistique du Moyen-Orient’, for which he traveled to Damascus and Tehran in the spring of 2007. In 2009 he founded the Atlas Academy, a laboratory for the creation of intercultural music, which takes place every August in the Conservatory of Amsterdam.




photo: Kadir van Lohuizen