Kristofer Svensson

Swedish kacapi musician, music theorist, and composer, born 1990.

His* music is characterized by simple moments of harmonic sounds appearing and disappearing in a dynamic correspondence with emptiness. Tuning harmony in Just Intonation, a characteristic feature of all their music, and often letting tones emerge from silence through noise, draws attention to music’s simple raw materials — the aperture of sound and transparency of tone.

Svensson's music 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, the Swedish Wind Ensemble, N/A ensemble, Arcus Collective, Bennardo/Larson duo, Norbotten NEO, and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble at festivals such as Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (US, 2015), Kalv (SE, 2015), Nordic Music Days (FO, 2021), KROCH fest (SE, 2018), Svensk Musikvår (SE, 2019), Sound of Stockholm (SE, 2016), Ung Nordisk Musik (IS, 2017 and SE, 2019), University of Toledo's Festival of New Music (US, 2018), and o/modernt (SE, 2013). In October 2017, a portrait concert with Svensson's music titled “pale air (oscillating)” was given at Scandinavia House in New York City.

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 online at https://intimatingemptiness.blogspot.com.

*Kristofer uses "they/them/their" pronouns