About

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

Svensson’s compositions have 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, Norrbotten NEO, and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Their music has been featured at festivals including Edition Festival for Other Music (SE, 2023), MATA (US, 2023), Nordic Music Days (FO, 2021), Svensk Musikvår (SE, 2019), Ung Nordisk Musik (IS, 2017; SE, 2019), Sound of Stockholm (SE, 2016), and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (US, 2015 & 2025).

In October 2017, a portrait concert titled pale air (oscillating) was devoted to Svensson’s music at Scandinavia House in New York City. One of the works premiered there, the violin solo Duk med broderi och bordets kant, was later recorded by Maya Bennardo and released on the album four strings (2022). The album was selected as one of Bandcamp Daily’s “Ten Best Contemporary Classical Releases of 2022” by Peter Margasak, who described Svensson’s piece as “one of the most astonishing pieces of music I’ve heard all year.”

Svensson’s musical path integrates diverse traditions. They studied shakuhachi with Gunnar Jinmei Linder in Stockholm, qín with Yung-Hak Chi in Hong Kong, and Sundanese karawitan—with a special emphasis on the kacapi—with teachers such as 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 Swedish foundations including Gålös (2015), Anna Withlock Memorial Foundation (2014), Stiftelsen AAA (2013, 2015), and Erik och Göran Ennerfelts Stiftelse (2015). Svensson also studied composition with Fujieda Mamoru in Fukuoka, Japan, supported by a JASSO Scholarship from the Japanese government (2015).

Taken together, these traditions form both the societal and spiritual context of Svensson’s work—a context in which artistic, contemplative, and meditative practices merge. At the heart of their practice lies a search for resolution to the inescapable tension between a commitment to the Buddhist path and a commitment to art. Reflections from this ongoing search are shared in their online project Intimating Emptiness, which explores soteriological aesthetics and the philosophy of music.

As a kacapi musician, Svensson has been developing a justly tuned, modal practice of improvisation, performing both solo and in collaboration with Maya Bennardo, Vilhelm Bromander, Erik Blennow Calälv, and Etienne Nillesen. Their solo kacapi album Andra Segel (2020) was released on Svensson’s label kuyin, followed in 2022 by an ensemble recording with Bennardo and Blennow Calälv on the thanatosis label.

Their activities as a composer-performer have been supported by grants from the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation (2014, 2015), Anders Sandrews Foundation (2013), the Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019), and the Society of Swedish Composers (FST, 2016, 2018, 2023). They received a commission through the Swedish Arts Council to compose stilla sväva—two works for historical keyboard instruments written for Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz—which premiered in 2019 and was released on kuyin in 2022.

In addition to their own work, Svensson curates and manages the label kuyin, which has released music by Eva-Maria Houben, Kory Reeder, and Anthony Vine.

As an educator, Svensson holds a teaching degree in music from Linnaeus University and has taught courses primarily in the greater Stockholm area as well as internationally. At Nordic Music Days (2021), they led a text-score composition workshop with high school students in the Faroe Islands. Their pedagogical approach emphasizes experimentation and improvisation, fostering a free, non-stylistically bound mode of musical creation. Their graduation thesis from Linnaeus University, Variations in aesthetic listening, explores how non-conceptual musical attunement can be cultivated in the educational setting.

Svensson earned a Bachelor’s degree in composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where they studied primarily with Pär Lindgren, as well as with Magnus Granberg, and a Master’s degree in composition from the University of Hong Kong with the thesis The Use of Just Intonation in My Recent Compositions. Expanding upon Lou Harrison’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘free’ styles of Just Intonation, and correlating this with findings from music cognition and learning theory, Svensson has articulated an extended taxonomy of Just Intonation in which the novel ‘loose style’ is introduced. This ongoing research is published online as Varieties of Just Intonation.

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