Composers

Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir is an artist, composer and performer from Iceland. In her practice, she often employs collaborative methods, working with artists from various fields. Her works include performative installations and sound sculptures, including the audio-visual sculpture Hulda which was nominated for the President’s Student Innovation Award and the sound sculpture Lurking Creature which she developed in collaboration with the dancer Inês Zinho Pinheiro.

Lilja María’s works have for example been exhibited at the Dark Music Days Festival in Reykjavík, Reykjavík Arts Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, eavesdropping in London, Visiones Sonoras in Mexico, Quinzena de Dança de Almada in Portugal and Grand Theatre in Groningen.

Lilja María is a part of the art ensemble Hlökk along with Ingibjörg Ýr Skarphéðinsdóttir and Ragnheiður Erla Björnsdóttir. Their audio-visual album, Hulduhljóð, received the Kraumur Awards in 2019. The album was also nominated for the Icelandic Music Awards as album of the year in open category.

In 2022, Lilja María and Inês Zinho Pinheiro released the piece Internal Human as an audio-visual album. The project was nominated for the Kraumur Awards. The piece exists both as a live performance and as a video installation.

Lilja María studied visual arts at Gardabaer College in Iceland. She holds a B.Mus degree in music performance from Iceland University of the Arts and an MA degree in composition from City, University of London. As of 2019, Lilja María is pursuing her PhD holding a studentship at City, University of London. Her supervisor is Claudia Molitor.

Imprint (2023)

The piece Imprint is inspired by speculations about abandoned objects; imaginary stories that begin to take shape when one considers how and why an object was abandoned, how an object has influenced the shaping of its surrounding environment, and various future potentials of an object. While composing the piece, Lilja María revisited her personal connection to the violin and explored how her habits influence how she sees the violin’s sonic potentials.

Vanessa Isobel Black
An Australian/British composer, performer, and visual artist based in Oslo since 2017, I’m classically trained in violin and voice with a Bachelor in Composition (Sydney Conservatorium, 2004), and a Masters in Music specializing in feminist aesthetics (Western Sydney University, 2006) where I also taught and lectured in music philosophy.

Anders Hannevold
A composer of contemporary music, a classical pianist, and a music pedagogue, currently residing in Bergen, Norway. Hannevold graduated in composition (MA, BA) at the Grieg Academy with prof. Dániel Péter Biró. Besides this, he also studied Japanese aesthetic-philosophy, folk and contemporary music at Kyoto City University of the Arts with assoc. prof. Nakamura Noriko, and classical piano at Barratt Due Institute of Music with prof. Einar Steen-Nøkleberg.

Kristján Steinn Kristjánsson
A interdisciplinary artist and musician. His primary focus has been on the sensation of sound and sculpting absurd and new experiences by transforming ordinary household items into new musical instruments.

Ida Lundén
The music of Ida Lundén has a wide range of expressions: e.g. the exploring of sound and new ways of playing in pieces like Vingring and Susa Donker Low, inspiration, soundwise and rhythmical from other forms of music like Finnish tango in Halusin (I wanted), African wind-music in Boom-choff-leuit and performance-based solo pieces like Han (Him) and Spänst åt alla (Vigour to everyone).

Something that over the years has become more and more important is a close collaboration with musicians when writing a new piece. For instance in Murghi Utha she wrote a piece for the duo Jonny Axelsson and Ivo Nilsson that has resulted in music for a film; ”Transire”, and Murghi Utha for selfconstructed synthesizers, trombone, percussion and five co-players. In the radio play R she collaborated with the poet and musician Pär Thörn to create an aural fantasy over the letter R.
Her music training has been long and thorough, both as a musician, teacher and composer. Pianostudies in jazz and improvisation at the School of Music and Music Education, Göteborg University and studies in music composition with a.o. Sven-David Sandström at Gotland School of Music Composition, Pär Lindgren and Bent Sörensen at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Mathias Spahlinger, University of Music in Freiburg, Germany. Between 2004-2005 she held a scholarship at KunstForumHellerau, Dresdner Zentrum für zeitgenössische Musik and 2006 she was artist in residence and received the Omega award at Visby International Center for Composers. 2011-2013 she was Composer in Residence at the Swedish Radio P2.

Ida Lundén is a frequent keyboard player and performer in the fields of improvised music, avant pop and other experimental music. She collaborates with artists, film makers and dancers and has played regularly in the groups Ludd, (with percussionist Lise-Lotte Norelius), Syntjuntan and Konatus (with a.o. Dror Feiler).

Ida Lundén – Skymlot (2023)
Skymlot is a sonic exploration of the Vesper song tradition, Vesper bats and the violin. The violin accompanies the bats into the night and sounds out songs of dusk and evening – Skymlot.

Kent Olofsson
A composer with an extensive artistic output of over 200 works that span a broad field of genres, ensemble types and contexts including music for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic music, music theatre, rock music, music for baroque instruments and works for dance performances and installations. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras like Ensemble Recherche, Symphonieorchesters des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Swedish Radio Choir, KammarensembleN, Klangforum Wien, Oslo Sinfonietta and Avantii! and by conductors as Lothar Zagrosek, Gustavo Dudamel, Mario Venzago and Franck Ollu.
The last decade his artistic work and research has been particularly focused on exploring musical composition as dramaturgical strategies in interdisciplinary and intermedial theatre performances. Olofsson holds a PhD in artistic research with the thesis Composing the Performance from 2018. In the thesis he discusses the artistic and collaborative processes in five performances that he created together with Teatr Weimar and that are situated in the intersection between contemporary theatre, new music, radio plays and performance art. The productions with Teatr Weimar have been widely recognized also internationally with performances like Hamlet II: Exit Ghost, A Language at War and Arrival Cities: Hanoi, the latter composed for Vietnamese instruments, chamber ensemble and electronics. Recent works and productions in the field include the highly acclaimed Independence Day and In Search of Lost Time (a staging of Proust’s novel), two intermedial stage works created in collaboration with actor, writer, director, and performance artist Nina Jeppsson. Currently he is working with Jeppsson on a film project, Zonen, that takes it point of departure in the images and films of Tarkovsky.
Other recent projects are Alan, an opera for voice and electroacoustic music about the mathematician and cryptoanalysist Alan Turing; Frozen in Amber which is a dance performance for two dancers and two electric guitar players; and the theatre play Fru Sorg based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf.
Since 2021 Olofsson is professor in performing arts for the research area Concept and Composition at the Stockholm University of the Arts.

Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir & Kent Olofsson – Violin with Þytur (2021)
Violin with Þytur represents a violin composition by Kent Olofsson created for Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir’s nine mono-channel installation created for the site of National Trust Formby as part of Stefánsdóttir’s site-specific public work Spherical White with Diamond. The work was commissioned by Curated Place (UK) in collaboration with the National Trust (UK) for NATUR-North Atlantic Tales. Þytur is a sonic response to the site which is one of shifting shores and part of UK’s largest sand-dune system. The composition grew out of activations with various materials, field recordings, site-specific score, sonifications, archival digging and improvisations. At the same time Stefánsdóttir used the site’s morphing landscapes and transmogrification, as a key to its composition.

The text in the work is constructed by Stefánsdóttir around Angela Rawlings’ work “Hocket barnacles” found in Sound of Mull(Rawlings, 2019). Performers of text material are Maja Jantar, Angela Rawlings, and Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir.
Olofsson’s composition was originally created for performance within the installation, at Gallery Night in Malmö,Sweden in 2021. It is now performed in a quadrophonic concert version which was premiered at the Sibelius Museum in Finland in 2023.

Przemysław Pacek
Violinist and composer based in Warsaw, Poland. He has been involved with music since the age of 4. Currently, he studies at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw in the violin class of prof. Ph.D. Agnieszka Maruchy and in the composition class of prof. dr hab. Aleksandra Kościowa. He tries to combine composing, performing and organizing activities. He also creates the podcast Classica according to the musician, in which he talks to people involved in classical music.

Ása Önnu Ólafsdóttir
An experimental musician and composer (b. 2000), hailing from the underground music scene in Iceland. With a sound that is both raw and intricate, Ása Önnu Ólafsdóttir creates music that challenges the boundaries of genre and pushes the limits of what is possible in modern music.

Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir
Hailing from the peripheries of Iceland, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir “elemental style” (Steve Smith, The New Yorker) follows inner logics when approaching composition, often integrating sound and other phenomena into an indivisible whole – creating mutable, breathing, living structures through experimental performance practices and notation.

Her work has been commissioned by and/or presented by renowned groups such as the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Esbjerg Ensemble, Norrbotten NEO, Decibel, Avanti!, Distractfold, Nordic Affect and KNM Berlin to name a few, while featured in major festivals and events such as Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart, Tectonics, Nordic Music Days, Only Connect, Ultima, Sigur Rós’s Norður og Niður, KLANG, SPOR, ISCM’s World New Music Days, Sound of Stockholm, Prototype, Sequences Art Biennal and more.

After finishing her bachelor’s studies at Iceland University of the Arts, Bergrún completed a master’s degree in composition from Mills College where she studied with the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith and Zeena Parkins before relocating to Brooklyn, New York to work as a composer. She has been the recipient of awards and support from the Iceland Centre for Research, the Jerome Foundation, Iceland’s National Public Radio, National Sawdust’s Hildegard award and the Elisabeth Mills Crothers award among others.

Since 2022, Bergrún is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík, where she currently resides.

Agape ( /əˈɡāp/ )
A text/graphic score calls for the performers to predetermine a sonic path unique to their own individual interpretation; they are instructed to navigate a sequence of changes in harmony with circular movements. Performers can come to mutual agreements on aspects of their individual performances regarding intensity/tonality/etc., but this is not necessary or necessarily wanted. Seeking to excavate an individual performer’s fingerprint, what becomes interesting here is how they choose to deliberate and deliver their navigation. Their performances are then collapsed together so a listener/observer can experience the contrast of these interpretations of the “same” moment – through conflating time, the activation of the vertical exposes the manifoldness of the horizontal.

Quorum Sensing
Quorum – the minimum number of entities needed for a deliberation.
Quorum Sensing – a mechanism by which life forms regulate gene expression through the use of signal molecules, allowing communication and coordination of group behaviour.

While almost solistic in the sense that it is becomes the principal violinists’ responsibility to drive and shape the piece, the contstruct explores the ensemble’s reflexes and response times as an organism, working together. Imagine a microscopic life form contracting their many appendages and releasing the engergy in multifaceted bursts to manouver around a limited space.

STRANGE TURN / NARWHAL
this piece was inspired by a phrase found in Timothy Morton’s ‘Dark Ecology’:
“two kinds of weird: a turning and a strange appearing, and a third kind, the weird gap between the two.”

Hubert Gabriel Żmudzki
The works of Hubert Gabriel Żmudzki (1997) are characterized by exceptionally developed harmonics and an accompanying dense, polyphonic texture. The emotionality and hypnotism of his compositions define his music in the spirit of metaphysical mysticism and symbolism. He creates in the current of microtonal music, post-sonorism and spectralism.

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