The music of Icelandic double bassist and composer Bára Gísladóttir begins from a consideration of sound as a living being.
Born in Reykjavik in 1989, she learnt violin as a child before taking up the double bass in 2006. She studied composition at the Iceland Academy of the Arts with Hróðmar I. Sigurbjörnsson and Þuríður Jónsdóttir and then at the Conservatorio di Musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ in Milan, where she began to compose seriously for the first time, under the guidance of Gabriele Manca and influenced by the music of Sciarrino and other Italian composers. In 2015 she moved to Copenhagen, where she completed her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music with Niels Rosing-Schow and Jeppe Just Christensen. She has lived in Copenhagen ever since.
The bass is central to Gísladóttir’s compositional aesthetic: her music often focuses on a single fundamental tone, over which she layers multiple worlds of sound, analogous to the range of harmonics and overtones that may be drawn out from a single point on a bass string. She draws no distinction between improvisation and composition – to her, one is simply a form of the other – and her music often features extended improvisatory elements, either for herself
to play solo or with her long-term collaborator, bassist Skúli Sverisson.
Inspired equally by death metal or techno as by Scelsi, Gísladóttir’s music explores extremes of noise and dynamic, often cut through with a dark sense of humour, as in the hour-long double bass solo SILVA, which begins from an image of an underground rave for trees; or the ‘rollercoaster for atheists’ for string trio and harpsichord, Split thee, Soul, to Splendid Bits (attn.: no eternal life/light this time around) (sample movement title: ‘OMFG have mercy on us’).
As well as her duo with Sverisson, Gísladóttir also performs with Iceland’s Elja Ensemble.
In 2025 Bára Gísladóttir received the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Honoray Award. In 2024 she was awarded the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, encompassing not solely the monetary prize but also the co-production of a portrait CD. In 2018 she won the Léonie Sonning Talent Prize. In 2022, her VÍDDIR was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. Gísladóttir’s music is published by Edition·S, and it has been recorded for the Smekkleysa, Dacapo Records, Sono Luminus and Mengi record labels.
- Tim Rutherford-Johnson
