Kristine Tjøgersen’s (*1982 in Oslo, Norway) compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor and precision. Through her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other.





Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas that allows her to incorporate organic forms into the music. Her music is developed in support of the notion that astonishment lies wherever one is willing to look.

As Tjøgersen puts it, “By giving nature a voice in the concert hall, I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life, and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.”

Born in 1982 in the Norwegian village of Sagesund, Tjøgersen received her bachelor’s and master’s in clarinet from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied with Hans Christian Bræin. She then pursued a master’s in composition from Anton Bruckner Universität in Linz, Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt. Her works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Pinquins, SWR and WDR Symphonieorchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as at festivals including ECLAT, Ultraschall, Wien Modern, Tectonics, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Ultima.

In 2019–20, Tjøgersen was a fellow at Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 2020 she received Norway’s top composer award, the Arne Nordheim Prize, as well as the Pauline Hall Prize for her orchestra piece Bioluminescence. In 2021, she was awarded Work of the Year from the Norwegian Society of Composers for Piano Concerto. Her work Between Trees was the selected work of the 2022 International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo and won the Coup de Coeur des Jeunes Mélomanes from Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2023. In 2024, she was awarded the Edvard Prize for her orchestra piece Pelagic Dreamscape. 2025 saw Tjøgersen honored with a Composer Prize from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.





 
As clarinettist she has performed at many of the major European new music festivals
with the award winning ensembles Ensemble neoN, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi and asamisimasa.





A portrait of Kristine Tjøgersen - trailer from Ultima Contemporary Festival on Vimeo.