Winners of the Nordic Council Music Prize 2014

Last year’s winner, Pekka Kuusisto, presented the DKK 350,000 prize in Stockholm City Hall and read from the adjudication committee’s motivation:

Motivation

“Black Box Music, by the innovative composer Simon Steen-Andersen (born 1976), is a unique and radically different work. Andersen plays, with great virtuosity, in the intersection between composition, installation art, electronica and performance. Black Box Music is a challenging piece of avant-garde music, quite unlike anything else, and yet embracing it requires no prior musical knowledge. It is unusual for a form of expression as personal as this to reach so many people. Andersen's works are played by musicians and at festivals all over the world, from Shanghai to South America and Europe. Black Box Music is captivating – an uncontrollable blend of craziness, humour, charm and exuberant inventiveness. The piece also meets this year’s criteria for the Nordic Council Music Prize: it is a work of high artistic quality and original in its genre. It has a clear structure and form, and its third movement contains elements that emerge spontaneously in the performance moment.”