Donemus Webshop — Lo-A-Njoe, Martin

Martin Lo-A-Njoe was born on August 23, 1969 in Paramaribo (Suriname). He has lived in the Netherlands since 1972. Martin had received piano lessons from Eduard Klinkert, among others. From 1992 to 1998 he studied composition with Daan Manneke at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. There he also studied piano (jazz) with Berend van den Berg. In the same period he also studied Ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam.
After his studies, Martin worked for many years as a pianist for various professional dance schools and also for the dance company of Krisztina de Châtel. Meanwhile, he has developed his own educational music practice since 2008. Starting with 2011, for a number of years he worked at the archive of the Netherlands Music Institute (NMI) in The Hague, working at their various catalogues of scores by Dutch composers, historic and contemporary.
During his studies, his ensemble piece 'Four Mallets' (1996) was performed in the Beurs van Berlage, for which Dutch composed Theo Loevendie, affiliated with the Conservatory of Amsterdam at the time, had curated the concert programme. The well-known Dutch saxophone quartet Amstel Quartet has also performed Martin's works in the chamber music series of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. In 2013, the trio To Be Sung performed Martin's arrangements of songs by the Armenian composer Grikor Mirzaian Suni. Martin has also written a number of works for the Huygens Fokker Foundation, the Dutch national center for microtonal music. These were performed during various music festivals in the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, including the Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2010 and the World Minimal Music Festival 2015. In 2020, an early work was performed during the concert 'Surinaams Klassiek' in the Amsterdam Museum van Loon, by violinist Yannick Hiwat and pianist Roderigo Robles de Medina.