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 works have been commissioned by some of the world’s leading ensembles and festivals/venues, including the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, The National Sawdust in New York, Prototype Festival, Sequences Art Biennal, Tectonics Festival, SPOR Festival, Nordic Music Days, Klang Festival among others. Other ensembles that have presented Bergrún’s music include the Oslo Philharmonic, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Esbjerg Ensemble, Norrbotten NEO, Avanti Chamber Ensemble, Distractfold, Cikada, KNM Berlin, Decibel and more. Her works have also been featured at prestigious festivals and venues such as Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart, Scandinavia House New York, Birmingham Symphony Hall, Tectonics/Only Connect, ISCM’s World New Music Days, Southbank Centre, Ultima Festival, Heroines of Sound, Arctic Arts Festival, Sound of Stockholm and many other events.
Bergrún holds a master’s degree in composition from Mills College, California, and currently resides in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she has been appointed assistant professor of composition at the Iceland University of the Arts since 2022.
For inquiries of any kind, please contact bergrunsna ( at ) gmail (dot) com
“The other highlight of the album, and a work that again plays into the implications and possibilities of group behaviour, is Venutian Wetlands by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, one of Iceland’s most consistently radical and exciting composers. The title implies a juxtaposition of earthly and extraterrestrial, and the music initially unfolds as something primordial: high, trilling formations that start to organise and accumulate in harsh, shrill bursts. A whiff of something lower triggers an increase in filigree detail, extended further when a subtle, shimmering tone (created from pitched-down flutes) materialises. This innocuous electronic element becomes a strange, alien presence, causing, among other things, a brief reevaluation of whether the instrumental sounds we’ve been hearing are real or simulated. It also serves as a slow-acting trigger, after which the entire nature of the ensemble undergoes a more total change than anything we’ve heard elsewhere. The first sign of it comes a little over halfway through, snuffling vocal noises and tics at the periphery; whereupon the group transmutes into a chorus of exotic creatures, gasping, grunting, panting, yelping, accompanied by final flourishes from the few flutes that have retained their original form. Venutian Wetlands is a bewildering, visceral piece that slowly but firmly undermines its opening impressions with more and more quantities of contextual strangeness, becoming something archetypal and elemental, familiar yet foreign.”
Peter Margasak for Best of Bandcamp
“The tone is set with Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s “Venutian Wetlands,” a deliciously disorienting collision of piercing upper register clusters, animal-like grunts, and unstable fluctuations—like a placid drift abruptly suddenly snagged by turbulence.”
“Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's Axis Spirat united with beautiful expressiveness Icelandic drones and the attacking pulse around a blue, flashing pillar of light.”
Karolina Dąbek for Ruch Muzyczny
“Strange Turn/Narwhal - Bergrun Snæbjörnsdóttir showed development: from a single pitch, through flickering, to unbearable rasps and squeaks rubbed with a styrofoam bow. Seemingly nothing, a trivial idea - it allowed me to immerse myself deeply in the sound and hold my breath in a beautiful, intense experience."
Agape nominated for “work of the year” in the classical/contemporary category at the Icelandic Music Awards 2022
“The composition that proved most compelling of all was presented in two forms, live and as an installation. Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Ecognosis takes its title from a term coined by Timothy Morton to refer to a particular kind of ecological, specifically self-, awareness, described by Morton in this way:
It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation. Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop—a weird knowing.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology, p.5
That phrase, “becoming accustomed to something strange”, is a good description for my own experience of beginning to get to know Bergrún’s music, since first contact at the Nordic Music Days in 2019. Her piece Ecognosis takes the sounds being made by a quintet of bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola and cello and channels them into an array of tam-tams dispersed throughout the space, both distant and up close to the audience. The nature of these transduced sounds exhibits another kind of strangeness in terms of their relation to the ensemble, sometimes resonating them as a clear source, but just as often becoming something oblique, the tam-tams appearing almost to breath and snort ominously, or ganging up to form dense networks of noise.
The entirety of Ecognosis was intoxicating, veering between episodes of achingly intimate chamber music (during which the tam-tams fell silent) and huge, hyperreal sonic expansions that saturated the hall, drowning us in reverberation, all the while progressing from a starting point of clear, almost-unison, pitch focus toward increasingly harsh distortions and clusters, before gradually finding its way back to that initial intimacy, ending in a soft echo of the wavering almost-unisons from which it began. This was the Dark Music Days at its most literal – Ecognosis is in almost every sense of the word “dark” music – but also at its absolute best: weird, mesmeric and gorgeous.”
Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir on ‘Agape’ (2021) for Ríkisútvarpið RÚV / National Public Radio
"Þá er verk Bergrúnar Snæbjörnsdóttur, Agape, afar áhrifaríkt, en í því tekst hún á við flóknar hugmyndir um samfall tíma og rúms með því að skapa samhliða frásagnir fjögurra hljóðfæraleikara. Hljóðfæraleikararnir túlka abstrakt textaskor hennar á fjögur hljóðfæri; hörpu, selló, kontrabassaklarínett og slagverk, í samspili við upptökuvél sem dregin er í kringum þau í stöðugri hringlaga hreyfingu. Hliðstæðir flutningar þeirra á skorinu eru svo felldir saman þannig að þeir eru upplifaðir samtímis í margföldum myndfleti undir nokkuð óhugnanlegum en mögnuðum hljóðheimi."
"Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's work, Agape, is also very effective, in that it tackles complex ideas about the coincidence of time and space by creating parallel narratives by four instrumentalists. The instrumentalists interpret her abstract text score on four instruments; harp, cello, contra bass clarinet and percussion, in conjunction with a camcorder drawn around them in a constant circular motion. Their parallel performances are then combined so that they are experienced simultaneously through conflated imagery, while bringing about a rather ominous but magnetic sound world.”
Icelandic Music Awards 2020 - Event of the Year
“On the one hand, there was something bleak, even harsh, about the musical landscape it inhabited (hardly unusual for an Icelandic composer), the players arranged at the edges of the stage, articulating a mixture of low register textural noises and squally overtones and multiphonics. Often this happened in complete darkness, the work being haphazardly lit by a collection of intermittently flashing lights. Yet on the other hand, its actual and figurative blackness was surprisingly inviting, offering access to a sonic space where things were being fashioned in a completely new way. It felt amorphous, nascent, like a sonic equivalent of the embryonic mush in a chrysalis, in the process of becoming something new, the lights an accompanying bioluminescence.”
- on ‘Areolae Undant’ performed by Esbjerg Ensemble, Nordic Music Days 2019
Peter Margasak for Best of Bandcamp
(…) “Tail, Lathed” by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, a beguilingly elusive collage of frictive rhythmic spasms and terse, throbbing strings and reeds that recalls the fury of the natural world, but which ultimately forms its own logic and flow.
Alyssa Kayser-Hirsh for The National Sawdust Log
“Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Tail, Lathed rounded out the program, incorporating visual elements through a handful of vintage light bulbs surrounding the ensemble. As the overhead lights in the room went out, a blustery soundscape set in, becoming increasingly rumbly without entirely eclipsing solo instruments that slowly emerged in time with the flickering of an individual light bulb. The resulting bleak expanse was penetrated with outbursts of arresting light and sound, until the work came to an abrupt ending.”
Amanda Cook for I Care If You Listen Editor’s Picks: 2020 Contemporary Classical Albums
“complex, textural, glacial blocks of sound”
- on ‘Tail, Lathed’ performed by The National Sawdust Ensemble
Robert Barry for The Wire
“A circle of light appears in the middle of the floor with a single white dot spinning in perpetual orbit. A woodwind quartet stands around it. As the dot passes them by they play a note - long if the dot spins slowly, short if it rushes past at speed. It is simplicity itself. But then a second ring is added with its own dot, asynchronous with the first. And then a third ring. Add to that the position of the audience, surrounding the four winds, with a further outer ring of brass around the audience, intoning long, langorous chords, and you get a work capable of bewitching effects, even as its means remain perfectly transparent.”
-on ‘Esoteric Mass’ performed by the Oslo Philharmonic at Tectonics/Only Connect Festival 2016
-
“The opening poem, “Before the Beginning,” which featured music by Bergrun Snaebjörnsdóttir, featured harmonic runs on the strings with more a spoken vocalization that would further transform into more yearning straight tone on repetitions of “Again and Again without knowing who or why or from whence it came?”
- on ‘Magdalene’ at Prototype Festival 2020
Peter Szep for the Indie Opera Podcast
“This final technique was used to great effect in the movement entitled Before the Beginning by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. M. was in a very dark place and the Sprechstimme, which refers to a combination of speech and song, allowed the text and her pain to speak for themselves. “
- on ‘Magdalene’ at Prototype Festival 2020
Berkshire Fine Arts - International Contemporary Ensemble: 12th Annual Appearance at Mostly Mozart
Steve Smith for the New Yorker - Goings On About Town
“…features music by Ashley Fure and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, fêted composers whose reputations ICE helped to burnish, and by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, a fast-rising Icelander whose elemental style suits her to this company.”
Jill Steinberg for the National Sawdust Log
“Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Tail, Lathed rounded out the program, incorporating visual elements through a handful of vintage light bulbs surrounding the ensemble. As the overhead lights in the room went out, a blustery soundscape set in, becoming increasingly rumbly without entirely eclipsing solo instruments that slowly emerged in time with the flickering of an individual light bulb. The resulting bleak expanse was penetrated with outbursts of arresting light and sound, until the work came to an abrupt ending.”
-on the National Sawdust Ensemble premiere of ‘Tail, Lathed’, June 2019
Jessica Peng for The Reykjavík Grapevine
On the second day, the first piece I saw was called “Areolae Undant” by Icelandic composer and performer Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Six instrumentalists were positioned in a circle in Silfurberg, with Bergrún standing in the center. The piece was somewhat centered around the interactive lights, which were beautiful. The audience were sitting around the circle, which made it seem like some kind of ritual.
-on ‘Areolae Undant’ at Sigur Rós’s Norður og Niður Festival 2017
Michael Rebhahn for Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, vol. 6/2016.
"...while at the same time jarring and poetic composition Drive Theory of Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir..."
-on ‘Drive Theory’ premiered by Scenatet, Curious Chamber Players and Ensemble Adapter at NMD 2016
-If those four works cumulatively adjusted the ears, others at Only Connect suggested we call upon our eyes to listen more attentively. Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Esoteric Mass projects its score of dots and circles onto the floor of a blacked-out space. Wind instruments from the Oslo Philharmonic played according to the movements of dots around concentric circles, seemingly emitting a note each time the dot passed the same point on the circle (extra circles appeared and sometimes the circles themselves were momentarily stretched or flattened, each ‘phasing’ the discourse). But whether or not we could see the notation, and it was a refreshing experience to do so, the methodology gave Snæbjörnsdóttir’s piece its own biology – its own heartbeat. As an overarching concept – letting your audience in on all those score-bound secrets – it has potential. But the byproduct is pretty good music.
-on ‘Esoteric Mass’ performed by the Oslo Philharmonic at Tectonics/Only Connect Festival 2016
Bergrún Snaebjörnsdóttir’s Instrinsic Rift (2016) was presented in an almost candle-light setting, which was very complimentary of the settled and transparent sustains from the two instruments. The electronic part was extremely shy, barely present, which was a tasteful solution giving ample room for the performers to dwell in carefully mixing their sound-colours. Only at the end did it create a slight swell, a slight wedge in between the two.
-on ‘Intrinsic Rift’ performed by Shasta Ellenbogen and Yngvild Vivja Skaarud at Dark Music Days 2016
Graham Mathwin for Sensible Perth
"...its subtlety, and yet its careful use of theatrical language, was its great success."
-on ‘2 víti’ performed by Decibel at PICA performance space
Bob Cluness for The Reykjavík Grapevine
-The performances from Icelandic composers were a mixed bag. On the plus side, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir's “Esoteric Mass For Winds” in Norðurljós was far and away the best thing I’ve heard yet from the S.L.A.T.U.R music collective. A group of woodwind instruments stood around a projection of moving dots around circles (similar to the models of electrons in an atom), playing notes determined by the speed the dot passed each musician. It was a concept so simple a child could grasp it, but the end result was playful, melodic and imaginative.
"Þar var næst á dagskrá Esoteric Mass eftir Bergrúnu Snæbjörnsdóttur. Tónlistin hennar byggðist á því að blásturshljóðfæraleikarar röðuðu sér í hring og spiluðu eftir mynstri sem var á sífelldri hreyfingu. Mynstrinu var varpað á gólfið. Fyrst heyrði maður aðallega endurtekna tóna, varfærnislega spilaða. En svo óx verkið upp í hápunkt sem var skemmtilega ærslafenginn og kaótískur. Hann samsvaraði sér prýðilega við hógvært upphafið og endinn. Þetta voru flottar andstæður." - Jónas Sen
"Next on the agenda was Esoteric Mass by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Her music was built on the concept of wind performers gathered around in a circle formation, performing by a pattern which was in constant motion. This pattern was projected on the floor. First one could hear mostly repeated tones, carefully produced. But then the piece grew into a climax which was animated, high-spirited and chaotic. It corresponded very well with the humble beginnings and end. The contrast was great."
-on ‘Esoteric Mass’ premiered by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at Tectonics Festival 2014
Photo by Art Bicnick
Photo by Derrick Belcham
Photo by Derrick Belcham
Photo by Nordica Photography