Performers & composers

Steingrimur Rohloff

The Icelandic-German composer Steingrimur Rohloff recently received a lot of attention, when he was awarded the Bernd-Alois-Zimmermann-Prize of the City of Cologne in Germany in 2003. This award was mainly given to him because of his large orchestral pieces, which the Jury called "of an original fantasy... a mastered technique in the treatment of the orchestra...melodically inventive...exciting color-developments..." Rohloff was born in Reykjavik in 1971 and later studied cultural pedagogy at University Hildesheim where he received piano- singinging- and percussion-lessons. He then studied composition with Krzysztof Meyer at the "Musikhochschule Köln". Supported by DAAD he went to the Conservatoire national superieur de Paris to study composition with Gérard Grisey and Marco Stroppa, electronic music with Laurent Cuniot  and Luis Naon and orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie. In 1999 he got selected for a course at the IRCAM/Paris and from 2001 to 2002 he studied electronic music in Cologne with Hans-Ulrich Humpert. Steingrimur Rohloff has received numerous prizes for his compositions. His works were played and broadcasted widely in Europe and in Japan, China, Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. In 2005 Rohloff has received a one-year scholarship by Ensemble Modern whom he collaborated with in several projects, one of which named RESPONSE where Ensemble Modern regularly sets up a childrens-opera. Rohloffs music is regularly performed at festivals like Nordic Music Days, Musik Triennale Cologne, G.A.S.(Gothenburg), 
Myrkir Musikdagar, Musik im 21. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken), UNM, Rheinisches Musikfest, Sumartónleikar Skálholt, “Frühjahrstagung für Neue Musik Darmstadt”, Squeeze Festival Seattle, Journées de la composition, Festival für zeitgenössische Musik Dresden, Randspiele Zepernick and others. His works were commissioned and supported by various institutions and foundations such as Nomus, Cultural Capital 2000 Reykjavik, Musica Nova (Iceland), Statens Kunstfond, Wilhelm Hansens Fond, Danmarks Nationalbank, Kuturstiftung North-Rhine-Westfalia, DAAD and others.

His works were played by Ensemble Modern, Caput, Aton-Ensemble, Aarhus-Symphony-Orchestra, Radio-Symphony-Orchestra-Saarbrücken, Ensemble 2000, Stringtrio Zilliacus/Persson/Raitinen, Ensemble Alpha, MIN-Ensemble and Soloists like Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, Tinna Thorsteinsdottir and others.

Vibrancy

Why are composers always late?   ...
 I believe that as long as we have not yet decided - not yet fixated our firstly vague ideas...we still feel „omnipotence“. We still feel what the poet Paul Valéry once called „the thrill of all possibilities“! And consciously I write “feel”, because I mean that this “feeling” keeps us from „thinking“. Because one cannot THINK all possibilities. But one can pretend to feel them.

 In the case of VIBRANCY I found myself „re-writing“ the piece even though still being in an abstract state, where the composition is not yet fixated. This „re-writing“ (in this primary level of thoughts) could almost be called a steady „paint-over“ through that the piece became multileveled – at least to my own ears. The more I reworked the piece, the more important grew the idea of vibrancy, which was for me also a result of the layers interacting with each other – causing a friction. And then to end with: the electronic part added a new layer to the piece, which could also be understood as some kind of resonance, which is besides “swinging/vibrating” the second meaning of the term “vibrancy”. The fascination of re-working a piece in ones´ mind is close to the interest of making it more complex. Not for the sake of complexity - but to experience the interdependence between the layers (of time/of thoughts) and the friction and vibrancies they cause.

VIBRANCY is written for ATON. The electronic part has been developed at the DIEM-studio in Denmark.