Maja S. K. Ratkje has been honing her interconnected performing and composing skills for more than twenty-five years. The process has placed her at the forefront of the musical avant-garde where, depending who you ask, she is either an exciting fresh talent or a respected elder stateswoman. Despite its boldness, Ratkje’s music is meant for sharing. At its heart lies her own voice, an open door to her individual musicianship and a constant tool for realigning her work with natural expressions and human truths.
Ratkje has collaborated with artists of varied disciplines since the 1990s when she sang jazz, played the piano, joined a Gamelan group and co-founded the Oslo Industrial Ensemble. Mathematics, philosophy and the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen and Arne Nordheim all tantalized Ratkje during her upbringing in Trondheim. In 2000 she graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Music following composition and vocal studies.
Ratkje soon discovered the limitations of the equally tempered scale. In 1997, she had mapped out the overtone spectrum produced by the lowest note playable on a tenor saxophone. A score based on the strongest 29 notes of the spectrum, Sinus Seduction (1997), became the starting point for a series of works under the collective title Moods while the spectral map would shape countless works to come. After a month-long trip to Japan in 2000, Ratkje wrote Gagaku Variations (2001) having mapped melodic and harmonic shapes of the gagaku music and dance tradition.
In 1999, Ratkje won Norway’s coveted Edvard Prize (for the first time) with another Moods piece: Waves IIb, a virtuoso orchestral work also honoured by UNESCO and the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Already, Ratkje was being lured into collaborations that would see the blossoming of a less conventional but still rooted voice. She worked with the percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love and joined the experimental ensemble SPUNK as a vocalist.
Ratkje’s trusting of her own voice proved revelatory. In 2002 she released the album Voice, a catalogue of previously unexplored vocal production techniques fused with electronics that was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica. From that conceptual turning point came Concerto for Voice (Moods III) (2005), the full maturing of Ratkje’s idea of the voice as an instrument. A residency at the Huddersfield Festival saw the first performance of And Sing While Thou On Pressed Flowers Dost Sleep (2012), which furthered the composer’s exploration of the interface between voice and music, electronics and acoustics. The piece highlighted Ratkje’s ideas surrounding the capability of different musical objects to push one another into life and action.
Ratkje’s care with her material extends a tradition in Nordic music. That is combined with a sense of fluency that conceals rigorous structural work and an elevating of the role of timbre to formal significance. ‘Form is the most important aspect of composition and the reason I consider myself a composer,’ Ratkje once said. She has also spoken of intuition as ‘an aesthetic filter’ – this from a performing and improvising musician who charges her creativity with the opportunity and risk of live performance. Many of Ratkje’s scores stretch beyond the confines of notation and many ask performers to improvise or produce material themselves. The result is a heightening of precision as well as liberty.
Ratkje is known as an activist as well as a composer and has focused increasingly on planetary and societal pressures in her work. The sound installation Desibel (2009) positioned the world’s loudest speaker system on the edge of a Norwegian fjord earmarked for mining, broadcasting a wall of amplified trombones. Revelations (This Early Song) (2017), a potent exploration of language and identity, is among her most performed works and had a natural successor in National Anthems (2024), a staged concert piece that takes aim at national identity and the dehumanizing effects of the very Artificial Intelligence it employs. A Whisper, or a Prayer, or a Song (2022) was performed as part of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra’s A Fragile Hope series, underlining the effects of the human impact on Nordic ecosystems.
Ratkje’s tackling of difficult issues can voice itself in more traditional forms. Ro-Uro (2014) for girls’ choir takes war as its subject and Thökk Will Weep (2022) for mixed choir, first performed at the 2022 Lucerne Festival, addresses grief. But there is a strong seam of optimism in Ratkje’s work. Considering Icarus (2021), first performed at Donaueschingen and since taken up by orchestras around Europe, is an inspiringly idealistic and courageous trombone concerto.
Ratkje has contributed to well in excess of 150 albums and has written music for dance, radio plays and gallery installations. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, was the inaugural winner of the Arne Nordheim Prize and was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2013. She won the Liv Ullman Prize in 2020 and has recently been nominated for both the Norwegian Music Publishers’ Prize (in several categories) and the Spellemann Prize (for her albums RÖKKUR with Nordic Affect and All Losses Are Restored with Stian Westerhus). In 2010, she was the subject of Ingo Biermann’s documentary film Voice.
Andrew Mellor, 2025
