Dandelion Quintett & Kontai Ensemble
Biography Dandelion Quintett & Kontai Ensemble
Sophia Jani
The composer Sophia Jani is part of a new generation of young artists who were influenced early on by the boundlessness of the 21st century.
Her music lives from influences of various artists of all times and nations: from Bach and Schubert to the European and American avant-garde of the 20th and 21st century to avant-pop artists like Björk and Ryuichi Sakamoto, or electronic music producers such as Tim Hecker, Laurel Halo or Skee Mask. In this manner, Sophia Jani creates music with a narrative dramaturgy that at the same time suspends any sense of time - calm, powerful, elegant, dance-like - and in so doing she finds her idiosyncratic way to create a poetic minimalism that imaginatively and cleverly takes the listeners by the hand and, leaving familiar paths behind, opens up new horizons together.
After an early, classical education in piano and violin, she spent a year at the Conservatoire Jacques Thibaud Bordeaux after high school. After subsequent studies in economics, she decided to devote herself exclusively to the creative exploration of music and completed her studies in composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich in 2018.
In 2014, she released the experimental EP Relive (Denovali Records) together with composer Carlos Cipa. Since then, her music has been performed by the Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia, the Bang on a Can Festival Fellows, the Omer Quartet, the Sirius Quartet, the Kontai Quartet, and the Dandelion Quintet, among others. She has also written commissioned works for pianist Eunbi Kim, guitarist Jiji Kim, as well as violinist Teresa Allgaier, and contributed music to successful theater and dance projects. Also together with Carlos Cipa, in 2019 she produced the electronic score for Alireza Golafshan's feature debut The Goldfish, for which the director was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize's Young Talent Award. In the summer of 2019, she was one of eight international fellows at the Bang on Can Festival in Massachusetts, USA, where she worked with renowned composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, as well as contributing a commissioned work under the baton of conductor Brad Lubman. In 2021 she was awarded one the Scholarship for Music by the City of Munich.
Her music has been presented several times by Elizabeth Alker in the BBC 3 series Unclassified. In addition, her music was included in the End of the Year sampler of the label A Strangely Isolated Place, as well as in the Piano Cloud series of 1631 Recordings. In 2020, her composition for solo piano summer and summer and winter again appeared as a single release on Moderna Records. Since September 2020, she has been continuing her studies in composition with David Lang and Martin Bresnik at the Yale School of Music in the US with the generous support of the Fulbright Foundation. In February 2022, her debut album with chamber music works will be released on the Berlin label Neue Meister.
