About

Anders Torgunrud Røshol is a Norwegian composer who mainly works with acoustic music. Through his work, Røshol often explores the potential of contrasting musical ideas to generate new and unexpected material. He views his compositions as processes of discovery, where multiple ideas interact and gradually build their own world around themselves. His music has been performed and recorded internationally, and he has collaborated with some of Norway's leading ensembles, such as Oslo Sinfonietta, BIT20 Ensemble, Nordic Voices, and SISU Percussion.

Røshol was born in Hamar, Norway, in 1988. His studies in musicology at the University of Oslo sparked his interest in music composition and led him to the Grieg Academy at the University of Bergen, where he studied with Morten Eide Pedersen (1958-2014). Røshol completed his master's studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo in 2016 under the guidance of Professor Asbjørn Schaathun and has since been working as a composer while also teaching music composition in Norwegian upper secondary education.

Since participating in a workshop with the Bergen-based group BIT20 Ensemble during the Borealis Festival in 2011, Røshol has continued to work with the ensemble, resulting in a performance of "Like a Ring of Ripples" (2014) and a commission for the work "Swiveling in a Flexible Unison" (2021), which earned Røshol a nomination for both the Edvard Prize 2022 from the Norwegian performing rights organization TONO, and "Work of the year 2023" from the Norwegian Society of Composers.

Røshol has also collaborated with ensembles and musicians internationally, participating in festivals such as the Takefu International Music Festival in Japan and working with musicians from Ensemble Intercontemporain at the Manifest Festival in Paris. In 2018, he was commissioned to write the duo “In Trembling White” (2019) for soprano saxophone and shamisen for Masanori Oisshi and Hidjiro Honjoh, who was at the time a "Japan Cultural Envoy" appointed by the government.

Recently, Røshol has focused on writing vocal music, with pieces like "En verden bortenfor øynene" (2022), a large setting of six poems by Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen for baritone, guitar, and ensemble, and “The Silence of the Lilacs Fluttering” (2024), based on poems by Alejandra Pizarnik for the vocal sextet Nordic Voices.

– December 2024