Benedicte Maurseth is a well-established and esteemed performer and composer on Norway’s music scene. She has studied with Hardanger fiddle master Knut Hamre for close to thirty years and is an alumna of the Ole Bull Academy. Maurseth has toured extensively as a soloist and in collaboration with others, both in Norway and internationally. She works closely with many of the leading artists across genres and artistic expressions such as Jon Fosse, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Rolf Lislevand, Mats Eilertsen, Berit Opheim, Merilyn Crispell, and more. Maurseth has written music for theater and film and other commissioned works for festivals and albums. The work Tidekverv, which was premiered in 2017, was awarded NOPA's music prize, and her song «Very Full», which was specially written for the TV series Loki (Marvel Studio), ranked high on the Billboard list.

Maurseth also received many prestigious artist grants from the Norwegian state for cultivating her tradition and creative work. She has recorded albums for Grappa Musikkforlag (Hubro & Heilo) and ECM Records, and has also published books, articles and essays. Her book To be nothing. Conversations with Knut Hamre, Hardanger Fiddle Master, was published at Terra Nova Press / MIT Press fall 2019.  Her latest album Hárr was awarded «Best Nordic album of the year» and received the prestigious Nordic Music Prize for 2022. In 2022 she also released the book Systerspel (Fiddlesisters) about the history of female fiddle players in Norway from 1700 until today. For this work she was awarded the prize «Folk musician of the year» in 2023 and also received the Sff-award for her outstanding contribution to the history and traditional music of Norway.
 

Kristine Tjøgersen (*1982 in Oslo, Norway)’s compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor and precision. Through her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other.

Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas that allows her to incorporate organic forms into the music.

As Tjøgersen puts it, “By giving nature a voice in the concert hall, I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life, and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.”

She holds an MA in composition from Anton Bruckner Universität in Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt, and an MA in clarinet from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied with Hans Christian Bræin.

Her works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, Pinquins, SWR and WDR Symphonieorchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as at festivals such as ECLAT, Ultraschall, Wien Modern, Tectonics, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Ultima.

In 2019–20, Tjøgersen was a fellow at Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and in 2020 she received Norway’s Arne Nordheim Composer Prize, as well as the Pauline Hall Prize for her orchestra piece Bioluminescence. In 2021, she was awarded “Work of the Year” from the Norwegian Society of Composers for her Piano Concerto. In 2022, she won the International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo, and in 2023 she was the winner of Coup de Coeur des Jeunes Mélomanes from Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco for her orchestra work Between Trees.

kristinetjogersen.no