Words by Kris Kropff
Shortly after the release of The Grotesque & The Sublime, Bjarnason shared a few thoughts about the project, opening with “people are thirsty for artists to take risk, show them worlds, invite them on a journey.” He’s right, but what I think is the most remarkable risk – amid what is itself, a remarkable album – is that he didn’t force a journey into a contrived land.
This is a classical album. FEAST is a piano concerto inspired by literature from a well-known writer, in this case a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. This is Liszt or Rachmaninoff. This is not just setting the bar high (and, wow, did he ever clear it) it’s believing that “chasing innovation directly is rarely a good way to make meaningful art” and taking the risk that others will delight in the journey.
Off Shelf: Inferno and FEAST were both written for specific players. Would you talk a bit about your compositional process and how collaboration fits, and doesn’t, within it?
Daníel Bjarnason: Composing is inherently a solitary activity. At some point you simply have to sit down with the instrument or the manuscript and write the music, and there’s a constant internal dialogue happening while you do that. It can be quite a lonely process.
What I enjoy about writing for specific soloists, as in these two concertos, is that it introduces another presence into that solitude. When I’m writing, I can almost conjure the performer in the room with me. I imagine how they would play a gesture, how something might feel under their hands, even how they might react to a certain idea. That imagined dialogue becomes part of the creative process, though of course everything is ultimately filtered through the prism of my own musical voice.
My compositional process itself is not especially systematic. I rely a lot on intuition and on reaching a kind of flow state. I strongly believe that the subconscious mind usually produces the most interesting ideas. I try not to judge those early impulses too quickly—to let the material emerge quite freely at first.
Later in the process I become much more analytical about it. Once there is enough material, you can step back and look at it more like an architect or a chef working with ingredients—shaping the form, deciding what belongs where, thinking about proportion and balance. Over time, through composing and conducting a lot of music, you develop an internal sense of structure that guides those decisions.
So the process tends to move back and forth between those two modes: a more organic, intuitive phase where ideas are allowed to grow freely, and a more deliberate phase where the piece is constructed and refined.
OS: Were you doing any intentional listening as you were working on FEAST?
DB: I wasn’t listening to anything specific while writing FEAST, at least not consciously. I’m always listening to a lot of different music, and over time the things you perform, study, and live with inevitably become part of your musical vocabulary. Sometimes ideas or gestures surface from that subconscious reservoir without you even recognizing where they came from.
I’ve always liked the idea of music as a language that exists in dialogue—a conversation not only with the musicians you work with, but also with composers of the past. No piece of music is created out of nothing, and I think that exchange across time is a completely natural part of the art form.
Because of that, I’ve never been particularly concerned with the idea that music history must constantly “move forward” through innovation. Chasing innovation directly is rarely a good way to make meaningful art. Innovation tends to happen organically, as a byproduct of following your instincts and engaging honestly with the material and with your times—keeping your ears open and your antenna up, so to speak.
I often think of music history, and of an artist’s output, less as a straight line and more as a spiral. Artists evolve over their lifetimes, of course, but they also circle around certain core ideas, returning to them from new perspectives over time. In that sense, echoes or resonances with earlier music feel less like references and more like part of that ongoing conversation.
OS: What is the First Icelandic School and how do you see your role within it?
DB: This is actually a term I’ve only started seeing relatively recently, and I believe it was coined by the excellent Andrew Mellor. In some ways, I feel that questions like that are really more the territory of musicologists—people who can step back and look at things with a broader historical perspective.
From my position, I’m simply in the middle of it, making music alongside colleagues and friends. If I started thinking too analytically about labels like that, or trying to position myself in relation to them, I suspect it would only make things more confusing.
What I can say is that I feel very proud that so much interesting music is coming out of Iceland, and that I can be a small part of that. Iceland has an incredibly vibrant musical culture, and there’s a strong sense of curiosity and openness among musicians here.
If there’s something I hope to contribute, it’s simply to encourage younger musicians and composers to find their own voice and to have the courage to follow their instincts. If my work can in any way inspire that kind of independence and curiosity in the next generation, then that would mean a great deal to me.
OS: Time Out New York wrote that with The Grotesque & The Sublime you are “… coming eerily close to defining classical music’s undefinable brave new world.” How would you define classical music’s current world?
DB: I think classical music today is almost impossible to define, and in that sense it reflects the broader cultural landscape—it’s very fragmented. You can certainly identify trends or aesthetic schools, sometimes even tied loosely to particular places, but those are broad strokes. There are always individuals working within and outside those categories.
Personally, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable defining myself strictly as part of the “classical music world.” That’s not because I feel distant from it—my training is very much rooted there, and it allows me to do the work I love with orchestras, soloists, and ensembles. But my musical interests are quite broad, and I’ve always enjoyed moving between different musical environments and collaborating with artists outside the traditional classical sphere.
In fact, the more I work across genres, the more I realize that the qualities that define the most interesting artists—curiosity, discipline, enthusiasm, a certain intensity of commitment—are remarkably similar regardless of the style of music. Whether you’re working with a symphony orchestra in a concert hall or musicians from another musical tradition, that creative energy tends to be the same.
So from my perspective, contemporary music feels like a very open landscape. It’s porous. It can absorb influences from many places—different styles, traditions, and time periods—and composers can shape those influences into something personal. There are still pockets of dogmatism within contemporary classical circles, of course, but I think there’s also a growing openness—a willingness to embrace expression, communication, and the joy of making music in ways that perhaps earlier generations sometimes felt less free to explore.
OS: What will you be exploring in the coming months?
DB: I’m fortunate to have a number of exciting projects ahead of me—writing another opera, a new violin concerto, a Passion, working more with dance, film, recording an album of songs, and generally trying to work more in the studio. Collaborating with exciting musicians from different genres.
More than anything, though, my hope is simply to remain in a position where curiosity can guide the work. If I can approach each new project with a sense of excitement and discovery, then that already feels like the most rewarding path forward.