His works are often completely silent and challenge our fundamental perception of what music is.
"In my own pseudo-philosophical way, I’ve come to the conclusion that the essence of music cannot be sound," Jeppe Ernst has said about his silent works. "The essence of music must be movement."
His scores are built with familiar elements from classical music—such as rhythm, momentum, repetition, and climax—but without tones. Instead, the works consist of silent movements that appeal to far more than just the sense of hearing. Following Jeppe Ernst’s debut concert at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in 2018, the critic from Politiken hailed him as one of the most original voices of his generation—while giving the concert only a single heart, asking: how do you evaluate a concert without sound?
Jeppe Ernst has created works that unfold as a sensual choreography between performers, where the body becomes the instrument, and the music arises from their movements and touches. He has composed music for choirs of facial expressions, for breathing, for non-physical touch—and for virtually every movable muscle in the human body.
He has written works that exist only within the human imagination—a private meeting between composer and reader, where the score outlines rhythmic sequences and invites the reader to imagine distant explosions, raindrops in the palm of the hand, the sound of thunder, and feelings of joy and despair.
Jeppe Ernst is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music and has received, among other honors, the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl Nielsen Talent Award (2018). In 2017, he became the first recipient of the Pelle Prize, awarded to "a young artist who dares to challenge the norms of the time."
His works have been performed by both Danish and international musicians and ensembles such as NEKO3, SCENATET, Rei Nakamura, NJYD Quartet, and Ly Tran, and have been featured at festivals including SPOR Festival, KLANG Festival, Copenhagen Stage, MaerzMusik, Festival Musica, and Provinzlärm Festival.