Arne Nordheim Composer Prize

When artistic courage is recognised.

Every two years, the Arne Nordheim Composer Prize is awarded to a composer with an original and vital artistic practice, in the spirit of Nordheim. The spirit is less a style than an artistic impulse: to expand what music can be, to work curiously with sound, space, technology and instruments, and to dare to inhabit the new without breaking with tradition.

The award ceremony takes place at the Norwegian Academy of Music, an institution whose roots go back to the Oslo Music Conservatory, where Nordheim himself studied. In the Academy’s open approach to composition and experiment, this legacy continues to live on, also in works by current students Andrea Giordano and Martin Langerød, performed here alongside Nordheim’s Tractatus as well as an ensemble work by this year’s prizewinner.

To compose Say it again, Andrea Giordano draws on Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, a poem about violence against a woman, and how that violence becomes bound up with honour, shame, power and politics. Martin Langerød’s Animae moves toward the core of the human: the forces, impulses and contradictions that bind us together and tear us apart.

Programme

Andrea Giordano Say it again (2025, revised 2026)
Text: Excerpts from William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Martin Langerød Animae (2023, revised 2025)

Arne Nordheim Tractatus (1986)

Ensemble work by this year’s recipient of the Arne Nordheim Composer Prize

Before the concert

15.00, Levinsalen, Norges Musikkhøgskole
Arne Nordheim & Rannveig Getz Nordheim. The Music, the People, the Life

The film was made by Sigurd Ytre-Arne in collaboration with the Norwegian Academy of Music/NordART, Rannveig Getz Nordheim, Ole-Henrik Moe and Hild Borchgrevink, with Ellen Ugelvik/NordART as project manager.

Want to know more?

The Arne Nordheim Composer Prize was established by the Ministry of Culture in 2001, on the occasion of Arne Nordheim’s 70th birthday.
The prize is awarded every two years, and the jury is appointed by the Norwegian Society of Composers, the Norwegian Academy of Music and nyMusikk.
Several previous recipients of the Arne Nordheim Composer Prize are represented at Ultima this year: Cecilie Ore, Nils Henrik Asheim, Øyvind Torvund, Lene Grenager and Kristine Tjøgersen, as well as Jan Martin Smørdal, who has made several of the arrangements for Susanna Wallumrød’s Baudelaire songs performed by Wallumrød and KORK in Brilliant Suns.
Who this year’s prize winner is will be revealed on the day. A hint: listen for a composer who lets the quiet gather force, the almost motionless become tense, and historical traces resonate in unexpected ways.