Dániel Péter Biró

Dániel Péter Biró is Professor for Composition at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. In the last twenty years, he has addressed problems of historical listening and comprehension in his compositional work. In this way, the act of composing becomes for him a kind of sonorous archaeology; a discovery of the complexity of sound as an unstable, multifaceted object of culture, an unveiling of layers of history and meaning. Simultaneously, composing exists as the creation of new contexts for sound. Within this contradiction – the comprehension and preservation of that which is culturally and historically distant and its simultaneous modern transformation – the piece Vayaal Moshe (And Moshe Ascended) was created. In this piece, all the musical parameters, pitches, rhythms, dynamics etc. are based on a single line from the Hebrew Bible (Exodus chapter 24:15): “And Moses went up to the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain.”

Dániel has studied around Europe, the U.S and in Israel before taking his PhD at Princeton University in 2004. He has been commissioned and composed for prominent musicians, ensembles and festivals and has been awarded the Gigahertz Production Prize at The ZKM-Center for Art and Media in 2010 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 among others. His work has is being performed around the world and seeks a comprehension of history within musical material.

Photo: Linda Sheldon

Artist website