J.M. Suijkerbuijk was born on November 29, 1959 and raised in a humble coal miners family in the small village of Munstergeleen in the province Limburg, the Netherlands. He taught himself to read music at the age of eleven and immediately started writing his own music.

At age eighteen he moved to Utrecht, to study musicology at the university of Utrecht with Marius Flothuis, Jos Kunst and Kees Vellekoop, amongst others, graduating with a thesis on the relationship between Alban Berg’s violin concerto and Ferruccio Busoni’s Berceuse Elégiaque.

As a student, J.M. Suijkerbuijk developed his own compositorial language in which the pitch material is taken from a modal system based on overtones, which renders a form of tonal centre-based music that appears both alien and familiar.