About

Kristofer Svensson (they/them) is a kacapi musician, music theorist, educator, and composer from Sweden.

Svensson's music has been performed by soloists and groups such as Contemporaneous, ensemble mise-en, Quatuor Bozzini, andPlay, Mats Persson & Kristine Scholz, Musica Vitae, Miyama McQueen-Tokita, Bennardo/Larson duo, Norbotten NEO, and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble at festivals such as Edition Festival for Other Music (SE, 2023), MATA (US, 2023), Nordic Music Days (FO, 2021), Svensk Musikvår (SE, 2019), Ung Nordisk Musik (IS, 2017 and SE, 2019), Sound of Stockholm (SE, 2016), and Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (US, 2015). In October 2017, a portrait concert with Svensson's music titled “pale air (oscillating)” was given at Scandinavia House in New York City. One of the pieces that premiered at this concert, the violin solo ‘Duk med broderi och bordets kant’ was later recorded by Maya Bennardo and released on the album ‘four strings’ on kuyin in 2022. This album was chosen as one of the ten best contemporary classical releases of 2022 by Bandcamp’s Peter Margasak, who described Svensson’s piece as “one of the most astonishing pieces of music I’ve heard all year.”

Svensson studied the shakuhachi with Gunnar Jinmei Linder in Stockholm, the qín with Yung-Hak Chi in Hong Kong, and Sundanese karawitan (with a special emphasis on the kacapi) with, amongst others, Ade Suparman and Dody Satya Ekagustdiman, in West Java. These studies were supported by grants from the Indonesian Ministry for Arts and Culture (2013) and the Swedish foundations Gålös (2015), Anna Withlock Memorial Foundation (2014), AAA (2013 and 2015), and Erik och Göran Ennerfelts stiftelse (2015). Svensson studied composition with Fujieda Mamoru in Fukuoka, Japan supported by a JASSO Scholarship from the Japanese government (2015). Taken together, these musical traditions and lineages form the societal as well as spiritual context for Svensson's work—a context in which artistic, contemplative, and meditative practices merge. At the heart of Svensson’s work lies a search for a resolution to the inescapable tension that lies between a commitment to the Buddhist path and a commitment to art. Svensson shares reflections from this search in the form of texts on soteriological aesthetics and the philosophy of music online at Intimating Emptiness.

As a kacapi musician, Svensson has been developing a practice of justly tuned, modal, improvisation as both a solo performer as well as in collaboration with Maya Bennardo, Vilhelm Bromander, Erik Blennow Calälv, and Etienne Nillesen. In 2020, Svensson’s solo kacapi album ‘Andra Segel’ was released on the kuyin label, and in 2022, a trio album with Bennardo and Blennow Calälv was released on the thanatosis label.

Svensson's activities as a composer-performer have been supported by grants from Swedish foundations and institutions such as Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation (2014 and 2015), Anders Sandrews Foundation (2013), four awards from the Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019), three awards from the Society of Swedish Composers (FST, 2016, 2018, and 2023) and a commission through the Swedish Arts Council to write the program stilla sväva, consisting of two pieces for historical keyboard instruments, for Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz. stilla sväva was premiered in 2019 and released on the kuyin label in 2022.

Svensson obtained a teaching degree in music from Linnaeus University and has been teaching music courses at schools in primarily the greater Stockholm area but also in international settings such as at the Nordic Music Days in 2021, where they conducted a text score composition workshop with local high school students on the Faroe Islands. In the school setting, Svensson starts from a free, non-stylistically bound approach to musical creation that emphasizes free improvisation, playfulness, and experimentation.

Svensson’s Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition is from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where they studied composition primarily with Pär Lindgren but also with Magnus Granberg. They obtained a Master’s degree in Music Composition from the University of Hong Kong with the thesis “The Use of Just Intonation in my Recent Compositions”. Expanding upon Lou Harrison’s simple idea of a ‘strict’ and ‘free’ style of Just Intonation and correlating this idea with findings from recent research in music cognition and learning theory, Svensson formulated an expanded taxonomy of Just Intonation in which the novel ‘loose style’ of Just Intonation is articulated for the first time. This research can be found in the continuously updated online text Varieties of Just Intonation.

Contact:
e-mail: linuskristofersvensson [at] gmail [dot] com