Juliana Hodkinson

Juliana Hodkinson works with instruments, objects, electronics and visual formats. Field recordings, foley, media samples and spoken word also figure in both her live and installation works, whose scope ranges between extremely reduced chamber works and large-scale electroacoustic formats. Her works often involve extra-musical objects and parameters (ranging from feathers and matches to scrap-metal and field recordings), and frequently arise through collaborative, interdisciplinary processes. Her music often places contrasting sounds from disparate sources alongside one another, inviting the listener to complete the synthesis and integration of impressions within a specific context.

Her music has been played in Australia since 1999, when she wrote What happens when for the Pelican Babies trio. She collaborated with Aphids on Maps in 2000 and 2002, and performances at Adelaide Festival of the Arts and Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music have followed, as well as commissions from Chamber Made Opera and Speak Percussion.

Major works include the album Fish & Fowl, composed with fellow composer Niels Rønsholdt, and developed for live performance with visuals by Anka Bardeleben and text by Ursula Andkjær Olsen; Angel View, a semi-staged sound-theatre piece in 23 scenes; TURBULENCE, a chamber opera for soprano, actor and electronics based on a libretto by Cynthia Troup; I greet you a thousand times, for amplified orchestra and samples, developed with film by Joachim Koester; Prompt, immediate, now/ very restrained and cautious, a chamber piece with quadrophonic playback of media soundbites related to world security issues, and; Lightness, a work for amplified matches.

Her orchestral piece I greet you a thousand times was awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation, and her youth outreach production Rückspiegel: eine Hörsituation, commissioned by Konzerthaus Berlin, won the Junge Ohren Preis (Young Ears Prize). In 2015 she received Denmark’s highest artistic accolade, the Carl Nielsen Foundation Prize, for her oeuvre so far.