Juliana Hodkinson

Juliana Hodkinson's music has been performed in contexts ranging from contemporary music concerts to instrumental theatre and film. Current preoccupations include exploring possibilities for interdependency - between musicians, and between sound and image - in live performance. The music has been variously described as "intense", "intimate", and "ascetic". "Her music is full of strange sounds. But that strangeness has the peculiarity of quickly becoming familiar. Her microtonal deviations and the untraditional use of instruments reflect the sensuality of sound rather than negation. ... one senses a secure understanding of the fact that music itself can participate in the definition of its own space of unfolding, that it can contribute to softening the mental and institutional structures which surround it." (Søren Møller Sørensen, Institute of Musicology, Copenhagen).

Juliana has been based in Denmark since coming in 1993 to take lessons with Hans Abrahamsen and Per Nørgård. Since then, she has held foreign residencies in Tokyo (1996-7, as guest of the Daiwa Foundation) Mons, Belgium (1997-8, as guest of the City of Mons, l’Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Mons, and the Paris-based artist- exchange organisation Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes), Kongegaarden Centre for Visual Arts and Music in Korsør, Denmark (1999-2000) and most recently Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. At the Numus 2000 festival there was a portrait concert of her works with Ensemble 2000, the Århus-based contemporary music group of which Juliana was artistic director from 1997 to 1999. The newspaper Berlingske Tidende wrote: "constantly provoking one’s expectations of the listening activity, Juliana Hodkinson alone is reason to believe - providing she stays here - that Danish score-music is an activity with a future".

The ensemble-piece Some reasons for hesitating was written for the Canadian ensemble Nouvel Ensemble Moderne from Montréal and premiered at the Adelaide Festival 2000; the piece has since been performed also by Klangforum Wien. Recently, Juliana has initiated some larger-scale projects such as Maps, her ongoing collaboration with Australian composer David Young. Maps explores notions of cartography and distance as working models for musical material, bringing together musicians and artists from Denmark, Japan and Australia. In this context, Juliana devised a piece for slide projectors and ensemble, and a mechanical soundscape of measuring instruments for Maps Melbourne 2000, as well as collaborating on Maps the book. In October 2002 Maps København will open at the Institute of Musicology in Copenhagen, as a sequel to the activities in 2000, expanding the supporting themes of archiving and registration. Juliana’s first whole-evening instrumental-theatre performance All the time had its first performance season at Den Anden Opera, Copenhagen, in February 2001, involving musicians from Switzerland, Belgium and Denmark.

Juliana was born in 1971, and holds Master of Arts degrees from the universities of Cambridge (in music and philosophy) and Sheffield (in Japanese).

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