JOZEF VAN WISSEM

Biography

Jozef van Wissem is a Dutch minimalist composer and lute player based in Brooklyn. In 2013 Van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for the score of Only Lovers Left Alive at the Cannes Film Festival. An incessantly touring musician, Van Wissem studied lute in New York with Patrick O’Brien. He was commissioned by London’s National Gallery to compose a sound piece to Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Van Wissem wrote the music score for the video game, The Sims Medieval. He had an all black, one-of-a-kind baroque lute build for him and according to NPR’s All Songs Considered ‘his compositions are heavy and set in hypnotic darkness’