Sandra Boss' compositional voice is distinctly explorative with a strong interest in the hidden sonic potentials of instruments and technologies.
An important element within her work is a physical dialogue with technology in which machines and instruments are treated as co-performers. This approach has informed her compositional practice with the incorporation of, amongst others, a three meter long accordion, elongated woodwinds and a choreographic approach to percussion. The organ has found a special place in her practice, an instrument through which she has explored the hybrid of the flow of air that it shares with the human voice and the opaque and idiosyncratic aspects of its mechanisms. She has worked with conventional pipe organs and MIDI-controlled organs as well as home-built and ceramic-bird organs.
Boss’ recent practice moves towards investigating the many unexplored potentials that conventional acoustic instruments contain. Her recent works are increasingly score-based and build on the fragile relation between audience, performer, and instrument(s) in live performance. By making this relation slightly more unpredictable, she brings experimental DIY aesthetics to choir, orchestral, and chamber music.
Upcoming performance
Saturday 2 November at 1 pm Sandra Boss' piece ÆTER is performed by Chaos String Quartet in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall during the festival Nordic Music Days.
ÆTER refers to the rarefied element ether that was hypothesized by the ancients as to fill the upper regions of space. It also brings associations to the liquid used, especially in the past, as an anesthetic to make people sleep before a medical operation. In the work ÆTER for stringed instruments and EBows, composer Sandra Boss seeks out to construct a field of eerie sounds by using EBows on well known acoustic instruments. An EBow consists of an electromagnetic battery driven device that constructs an inductive string driver feedback circuit, which forces the strings to vibrate without touching them physically with your hands. By using an electromagnetic field actively to construct sound, ÆTER calls attention to the invisible space of signals that surrounds us and connects us all.
The concert is recorded for broadcast on BBC3. Find more information about the concert here.
Find the score for ÆTER here.
About Sandra Boss
Sandra Boss (b. 1984) grew up playing classical clarinet. Having studied both comparative literature and art history, she eventually took up electronic composition and graduated from DIEM at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark in 2013. In 2019 she completed an artistic-based PhD on sound art titled Tuning the Ear - Exploring Conditions and Conceptions of Hearing at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Sandra Boss’ works have been performed all over the world at venues and festivals such as Vancouver New Music Festival (CA), Super Deluxe (JP), Cafe Oto (UK), KRAAK Festival (Be), Detritus Festival (GR), SPOR Festival (DK) and Klangkunst Festival (DE). She has received both the Carl Nielsen Talent Award (2017) and a three-year working grant from The Danish Arts Foundation (2022).