Time and again, Simon Steen-Andersen has created works that radically extend the boundaries of music - defying expectations and presenting something entirely unprecedented in both sound and form.
His works unfold within a distinctive artistic field where music, performance, theatre, choreography, film, and installation merge with sampling, pop-cultural references, and game aesthetics in surprising and thought-provoking ways. Here, the familiar roles and formats of the concert are turned upside down with precision, humor, and deep musical insight. His art is at once intellectually sharp, sensuous, virtuosic, and immediately accessible.
Simon Steen-Andersen is the composer who lets a concert grand piano perform together with its own shattered mirror image, who transforms the conductor’s gestures into puppet theatre and musical choreography, and who makes opera history splinter and re-emerge as new music drama. His works are often humorous and spectacular, but never spectacle for its own sake - they are precisely constructed musical investigations where idea and craftsmanship form a unified whole.
Danish premiere at SPOR Festival
The day before his 50th birthday, on April 23, his orchestral work grosso received its first performance in Denmark. After ten years of intensive work with film and music theatre, grosso is the result of Steen-Andersen setting himself a “new” challenge: to write a work without multimedia layers or music-dramatic elements—using only instruments and electronics.
The piece is written for amplified quartet, Leslie speaker, and orchestra. At its center is the iconic Leslie speaker—almost like a fifth soloist—whose rotating motion, pulsating sound, and mechanical interior become the very engine of the work. grosso grows out of Steen-Andersen’s long-standing engagement with found material and ready-mades, here with a particular focus on the physical and sonic properties of instruments and objects.
grosso was performed by Aarhus Symphony Orchestra with the quartet Yarn/Wire as soloists, and the concert was part of the SPOR Festival program.
International success and Danish intimate concerts
Simon Steen-Andersen has firmly established himself on stages in concert halls and opera houses worldwide, and his work is more frequently encountered abroad than in Denmark. For that reason, the upcoming concerts on Danish soil are well worth noting.
The near future offers a special opportunity to experience a range of Steen-Andersen’s works in Denmark when Louisiana presents intimate concerts at the Boat House on June 6 and 7. Here, live performance and video are combined in a program that presents both full-length chamber works and excerpts from his extensive multimedia productions.
The list of upcoming performances abroad includes France, Germany, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium. In July, two productions—both premiered in 2025—will be revived: Wie Du Warst! Wie du bist! at Opernhaus Zürich and Run Time Anomaly with Sasha Waltz and Guests Youth Dance Company in Berlin. The next world premiere by Simon Steen-Andersen is UR!, presented in the autumn at Donaueschinger Musiktage, after which the work will tour to Paris (Festival d’Automne), Leuven, Brussels, Dresden, Kiel, Ghent, and Aarhus (SPOR 2027).
International awards and teaching across Europe
Simon Steen-Andersen has received a wide range of the most significant awards in European music, including the Nordic Council Music Prize, the Siemens Composers’ Prize, the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize, the SWR Orchestra Prize, the Reumert Award, and the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Honorary Award. He is also a member of both the Akademie der Künste in Germany and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Simon Steen-Andersen lives and works in Berlin and, alongside his work as a composer, plays a prominent role as a teacher for a new generation of composers. From 2008 to 2018, he taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, where he is now an adjunct professor, and since 2018 he has taught composition and music theatre at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern. He has studied in Aarhus, Freiburg, Buenos Aires, and Copenhagen.