Danish/German Mathias Monrad Møller works at the intersection of ideas and music as a way to try to capture the complexities of contemporary life. His compositions show a distinct interest in the conceptual staging of political, philosophical or poetic thoughts through music and are characterized by tensions between musical form and content, between ideas and their framing and between abstract sound as supertext and political reality as subtext. In subtle ways his works expose the infinitely layered and paradoxical space inbetween provocation, theatricality and pathos in ways that resonate deeply with today’s listeners.
Being trained as both a composer and a singer, he often explores the distinct characteristics of the voice as a prolongation of the human that is ‘in here’ while also being ‘out there’ – body and language as both deeply individual and expressly instrumental. Through using novel techniques of rehearsing and scoring, he strives to preserve the musicians’ spontaneity and fresh relation to the material – as a way of generating and enabling complex and living expressions that show how things can exist differently and sometimes in contrast to our habitual ways of understanding our world.
Mathias Monrad Møller grew up as a member of St. Thomas Boys Choir of Leipzig. He studied composition with Gerhard Müller-Hornbach and Martin Schüttler at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt/Main, before endeavouring on a strand of vocal studies – first in Berlin at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, where he earned his BA, then at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen with Susanna Eken, where he obtained his MA. This already brilliant educational trajectory was topped off with soloist studies at the Royal Danish Opera Academy (2017-2020).
Monrad Møller’s music has been performed at Unerhörte Musik Berlin, Acht Brücken Köln, Waverly Project, Young Nordic Music Days and Nordic Music Days. He has received commissions from Hessischer Rundfunk, Klang Festival Copenhagen, Mocrep Chicago, Aarhus Unge Tonekunstnere as well as he has been composer in residence with Solistenensemble Phønix16 in Berlin. He has received the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Talent Prize (2018) as well as the Léonie Sonning Talent Prize (2017). In 2021 he released the portrait album “The Best Version of Myself” with the renowned Col Legno label.
