{"id":3599,"date":"2025-01-09T23:40:33","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T22:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/karin-rehnqvist.se\/eng\/?page_id=3599"},"modified":"2025-01-10T00:00:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T23:00:50","slug":"biography","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/karin-rehnqvist.se\/eng\/biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Karin Rehnqvist was born in 1957 in Stockholm and grew up in the town of Nybro in southeast Sweden. At the Royal College of Music in Stockholm she studied music education from 1976, and then composition from 1980 to 1984. Her teachers included Gunnar Bucht, P\u00e4r Lindgren and Brian Ferneyhough. From 1976 to 1991 she was artistic director and conductor of the Stans K\u00f6r chorus. Between 2000 and 2004 she was composer-in-residence in a collaboration between the Scottish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras. In 2009 she co-founded KVAST, the Swedish Association of Women Composers, and from 2009 to 2021 she was professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, the first woman to be appointed to this position.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Rehnqvist\u2019s music sits at the intersection between folk and contemporary classical traditions. Particularly important to her musical style is the Swedish vocal practice of \u2018kulning\u2019, a type of shepherd\u2019s herding song that has become emblematic of her music. Kulning is a penetrating vocal call, sung mainly by women, to call livestock down from high mountain pastures. Sung using the resonant head voice, kulning calls can travel long distances in the open air. As well as this piercing quality, they have a melancholy air due to their use of flattened tones (similar to the \u2018blue notes\u2019 of African American music).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rehnqvist first drew on the kulning style in Puks\u00e5nger-lockrop<\/em> (\u2018Tympanum song\u2013herding calls\u2019) for two sopranos and percussion (1989). She was inspired by the emergence of two singers \u2013 Lena Willemark and Susanne Rosenberg \u2013 who were comfortable in the worlds of both Swedish traditional music and contemporary notation, and she has since written many works with the voices of one or both of these women in mind. Puks\u00e5nger-lockrop<\/em> allied the feminine expressivity inherent in herding calls with the concrete and corporeal. Since then, Rehnqvist has used kulning both explicitly and implicitly to explore the fundamental states of existence: the primordial facts of life in Sun Song<\/em> for female voice, two narrators and chamber orchestra (1994); the joy of innocence in Light of Light<\/em> for children\u2019s chorus and orchestra (2003, rev. 2023); isolation and communication in the outdoor happening Was Someone Calling?<\/em> for two singers, horn, trumpet and trombone, and street vendors (2006); women\u2019s resilience in the face of sexual violence in the monodrama Bloodhoof <\/em>(2019); and the peace of death in To the Angel with the Fiery Hands<\/em> for oboe and chorus (2000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poet and composer Bengt Emil Johnson has noted that Rehnqvist\u2019s allusions to kulning contain with them \u2018nursery rhyme and psalm, hymn and incantation, invocation and desecration, the lament of the professional weeper and the comfort of the lullaby\u2019. Often Rehnqvist sets these themes within a natural framework \u2013 the rhythms of the sun (Sun Song<\/em>), the sublimity of the Arctic ice cap (Arktis Arktis!<\/em> for orchestra, 2000\u201301) or the concentrated seasons of the North (Songs Between Light and Darkness<\/em> for soprano, two reciters, clarinet, alto saxophone and piano, 2021). In her recent music, this has been allied to a turn towards explicitly ecological themes, most notably in two major works composed in collaboration with the poet Kerstin Perski: Silent Earth<\/em> for chorus and orchestra (2020) and the opera Drifted<\/em> (2007\u201315).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rehnqvist\u2019s music has been commissioned by many of the world\u2019s leading contemporary ensembles, including the London Sinfonietta (Embrace Me<\/em>, 2005\u201308), the Kronos Quartet (All Those Strings!<\/em>, 2013\u201314; The Riddle<\/em>, 2017), Ensemble Recherche (Bloodhoof<\/em>) and Norbotten Neo (Night Chant<\/em>, 2020). She has won the Prix Italia (2014), the J\u00e4rn\u00e5ker Prize (2020) and the Nordic Council Music Prize (2022). But, expanding on her natural affinity for vocal and choral music, she is equally comfortable writing for young and amateur musicians, as in the children\u2019s opera Beauty School<\/em> (1999) and many works for children\u2019s and girls\u2019 choruses. In 2018 a book-length biography of Rehnqvist, written by Per F. Broman, was published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karin Rehnqvist was born in 1957 in Stockholm and grew up in the town of Nybro in southeast Sweden. At the Royal College <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3599","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P79arM-W3","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1670,"url":"https:\/\/karin-rehnqvist.se\/eng\/autumn-2018\/","url_meta":{"origin":3599,"position":0},"title":"Autumn 2018","author":"admin2","date":"October 13, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"10 August, 2018 Day is here! \u2013 for eight voices and strings \u2013 Premiere Musica Vitae, Vokalharmonin, cond. 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