
Composer Prize 2025
Kristine Tjøgersen
Essay
Where the Wild Things Are
On the music of Kristine Tjøgersen
by Jennifer Gersten
By any usual account, the contents of the Norwegian composer and clarinetist Kristine Tjøgersen’s bedroom cabinets—jam-packed with the likes of plastic pipes, knitting needles, and kitchen sponges—would appear as disposable household flotsam. For executing an oeuvre indebted to the curiosities of the natural world, however, these materials are essential tools. To evoke the pops of a joyful snapping shrimp, drag a pipe along a cello string. For the bubbling of swimming sea snails, flick a needle affixed to the fingerboard of a violin. If it’s trees whispering to one another through their roots, swipe a sponge against a drum.
Such are the soundmaking solutions of a composer who, from the start, has grounded her artistic life in play. Growing up in the tiny Norwegian village of Sagesund, the budding musician, who chose the clarinet for its caramel sound and wandlike shape, quickly gravitated towards experimentation. She found inspiration in orchestral music, but the sort of playing Tjøgersen liked best was what she accomplished while alone, where she could make whatever sounds she pleased. In college, she began dissembling her clarinet and improvising with just the parts. She asked herself: if I had just fallen to earth and were holding the instrument for the first time, what would I dare to try? But Tjøgersen kept this preoccupation secret, aware that her teachers disapproved of her unorthodoxy, lest it fracture her classical technique. For a time, she did as she was told, even as her diligence had started to make her feel like “a clarinet on two legs.” Her idea, after all, was to manage everything without fail—freelance in orchestras by day, play contemporary music by night, socialize until dawn, repeat.
Then, in her early thirties, a period of rethinking set in. To cope, Tjøgersen stopped performing, and watched her calendar go barren. What could she do if the mere sight of her instrument now made her uncomfortable? She considered applying to art school, as she’d always had a visual art practice. She also began composing in earnest. Early works merged her interests in visual art and sound, translating the gestures of rock stars or Bollywood dancers into ebuillent, sonic textures for small chamber groups comprised of musician friends. “Travelling Light” (2015), for the new music collective Ensemble neoN that Tjøgersen co-founded in college, imagines the silent patterns and colors of light she filmed from inside a tunnel as a pointillistic landscape of glissandi, wind, and groove.
Despite her growing output, Tjøgersen still didn’t really consider herself a composer. But the German composer Carola Bauckholt did: after one rehearsal with the Norwegian new music ensemble asamisimasa, apropos of nothing, she asked Tjøgersen, their clarinetist, if she ever wrote her own music. A stunned Tjøgersen wondered how Bauckholt could possibly have come to that conclusion—perhaps something about the way she’d played, or how naturally the compositional language seemed to come to her, but who was to say? Why don’t you come to dinner, Bauckholt said, and bring your scores, and Tjøgersen obliged.
Months later, Tjøgersen came to Linz, Austria, to start as one of Bauckholt’s master’s students. With her teacher’s encouragement, she gained the confidence to follow her nose. Her works started to take inspiration in nature, for which she’d fostered a profound appreciation from childhood, having grown up amongst fjords and forest trails and ski slopes. “Between Trees” (2021), inspired by the vast network of fungal threads through which trees exchange water and nutrients, stages a galumphing cavort from the roots of a forest to the canopy, where the orchestra ultimately soars in exuberant harmonies for oboe and brass. Her fascination with data on the timing and pattern of firefly flashes yielded “Bioluminescence” (2017), a work for orchestra that opens in darkness with the musicians wielding blinking LEDs that suggest the work’s bright muses.
Though much research undergirds her creations—traveling north to eavesdrop on pelagic birds, enlisting a biologist to join a theatrical production team, eavesdropping on Oslo’s bats through the detector that lives in her bag—her results are hardly diagrammatic; we’re left not with facts, but fantasy. A Tjøgersen score is at once extraterrestrial and tangible, enrobing sheer experimentation in avant-pop harmonies, dance floor rhythms, and classical swells, for sounds that require only a full heart to access. In the chamber work “Habitat” (2022), musicians set down their instruments to sing a dewy-eyed tune with synth accompaniment. In “Piano Piece” and ”Piano Concerto” (2020/2019), for electronics, piano, and live camera, not once does the piano soloist depress the keyboard: the sound is rather that of her dragging small plastic trees, sourced from a model train store near her flat, in increasingly helter-skelter fashion across the instrument’s strings. Perhaps her most ambitious work per capita, it’s a surreally rending portrait of how we relate to our planet, with a conclusion so bizarre you might not notice how wet your cheeks have become by the end. The impact of such creative impulses, though, is less explicitly activistic than Attenborough: her idea is that, by putting our ears up to beauty, we will understand why it is worth preserving.
Increasingly, Tjøgersen has worked like a director, coordinating multidisciplinary teams to realize works that are worlds in and of themselves. BOWER (2021/22), which stages an ode to the Australian bowerbird, and Nattliv (“Night Lives”) (2024), a music-theatrical spectacular on nocturnal creatures, unite scenography, costumes, and composition to render the stage as a habitat and musicians their own sort of sonorous species. Because such concepts bloom so readily in her mind, Tjøgersen senses that her projects are just going to get bigger. At any scale, though, the operating assumption remains the same. This music is founded on the notion that astonishment lies wherever one is willing to look—find the forest in the piano, the shrimp in the cello, the bird in the violin.
Jennifer Gersten is a violinist and journalist from Queens, New York.