The performing composer Maja S. K. Ratkje is at the forefront of the musical avant-garde. Despite its boldness and originality, her music is meant for sharing. At its heart lies Ratkje’s own voice, an open door to her individual musicianship and a constant tool for realigning her work with natural expressions and human truths.
Growing up in Trondheim, Ratkje 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 would all have a lasting influence on her work.
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.
Meanwhile, Ratkje was discovering the limitations of the equally tempered scale and began mapping the overtone spectrum (for the first time, of note, in Sinus Seduction, 1997). 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, she won Norway’s coveted Edvard Prize (for the first time) with Waves IIb, a virtuoso orchestral work also honoured by UNESCO and the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris.
Ratkje’s care with her material extends a tradition in Nordic music. ‘Form is the most important aspect of composition and the reason I consider myself a composer,’ she once said, and has also spoken of intuition as ‘an aesthetic filter’. 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. Some notable fruits of that process include Desibel (2009), Ro-Uro (2014), Revelations (This Early Song) (2017), Considering Icarus (2021), Thökk Will Weep (2022) and National Anthems (2024).
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. In 2010, she was the subject of Ingo Biermann’s documentary film Voice.
Andrew Mellor, 2025
