Bent Sørensen

Bent Sørensen (born July 18, 1958) is a Danish composer. He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2018 for L'isola della Città (2016).He studied composition with Ib Nørholm at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and with Per Nørgård at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. His mature works create a sense of decay that is emotionally similar to viewing an aging visual artwork. There is a sense of compromised beauty. Sørensen achieves this by treating major/minor tonalities with microtonal inflections and blurring the harmonies with glissandi. Examples of this technique can be found in his trombone concerto "Birds and Bells", a work for orchestra and choir "Echoing Garden", and his violin concerto "Sterbende Gärten", which took the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996. His early works deal with folksong in prosaic way. Sørensen has composed in a variety of mediums, including opera (his "Under the Sky" was premiered in 2004 at the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen), orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble and solo instruments, but notably he has not composed any electroacoustic music. Since 2008 he has been a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.