Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and striking sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material—it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired by nature’s structural qualities, like proportion and flow.
Thorvaldsdottir’s “detailed and powerful” (The Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, Nordic Council, and Ivors Academy, as well as commissions by many of the world’s top orchestras. CATAMORPHOSIS was premiered by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko in January 2021, following the orchestra’s European premiere of METACOSMOS with Alan Gilbert in 2019. ARCHORA—the latest addition to Thorvaldsdottir’s “ever-growing and ever more essential catalog of orchestral pieces” (BBC Radio 3)—was premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2022 by the BBC Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen. And “while [she] has made the symphony orchestra her own,” according to Gramophone, “her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy.” The Spektral Quartet’s recording of Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma, was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best recordings of 2021 (“a masterly entrance to the genre”).
Thorvaldsdottir is currently based in London. She has given invited lectures and presentations at Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Northwestern, and University of Chicago, as well as at the Sibelius Academy and Royal Academy of Music. In 2023, she will be in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a PhD (2011) from the University of California San Diego.
Ubique lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low, deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction—of various kinds and durations—as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions, but ever moving forward in the overall structure.
The work is inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time—an enveloping omnipresence—while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance. Throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite.
As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such—it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere, and material of the piece.
With love, for Claire, Cory, Katinka, Seth, and Levy.
—Anna Thorvaldsdottir