Dark Music Days Opening Ceremony 2019
19-20
Þórunn Gréta Sigurðardóttir, Chairperson of the Icelandic Composers’ Society and Gunnar Karel Másson, Artistic Director of Dark Music Days 2019 address and welcome guests.
After the ceremony, Riot Ensemble will premiere new work by George Friedrich Haas that is performed in total darkness.
DARK MUSIC DAYS
Dark Music Days is an annual festival of contemporary and new music which takes place during the darkest period of the Icelandic winter at the concert hall Harpa in downtown Reykjavík. The festival was founded in 1980 by the Iceland Composers’ Society as a platform for Icelandic composers to present their work. Today the festival is a platform for performing and getting to know new music with an emphasis on new Icelandic compositions and performers in addition to international artists.
The Dark Music Days 2019 will present a cross-section of pioneering contemporary music from both sides of the Atlantic. The focus lies on works with mixed techniques where the boundaries of contemporary music performance are explored.
The Artistic Director of Dark Music Days 2019 is composer Gunnar Karel Másson. Másson studied composition at the Iceland Art Academy and The Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen. He is an experienced concert producer as he co-founded and runs the Sonic Festival in Copenhagen and is one of the artistic directors of the music collective Jaðarber/Peripheriberry.
