When I came to Atalante last Sunday, I had heard very little of Ida Lundén’s music, …/ In many ways, I didn’t know what to expect. Now I have a picture. A fantastic world of sounds and melodies, humor and devotion. A playful world where the curious ear can discover and explore exciting contrasts and combinations but also retreat and rest in quiet clearings. Ida Lundén’s music is a colorful painting where the paint never dries, but continues to be mixed, moved and transformed into new landscapes, people and moods.

Aija Silén in Nutida Musik #295-296/2024 [Sweden’s leading journal of contemporary music]

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Ida Lundén (1971-) is a composer and musician active primarily in chamber music, electronic and improvised music.

Her music can be described as playful and exploratory and can many times take a starting point in an investigation of the changing society from the perspective of personal history, geography, political situation, climate, musical instruments, our need to meet or inventions. Previously existing music can often work as material for her compositions in a music that often combines the poetic with the noisy.

Collaborations are an important part of her artistic work and she has, among other things, composed music for several dance performances, both in Sweden and internationally. She has also taken part in Artistic Research projects like Back to the Future.

Her most recent projects has involved a commission from the Swedish Radio P2 to celebrate their 100 years, and in November 2025 a portrait concert called Sugluft, Skymlot, Gulla at Fylkingen Stockholm with seven different works from the last ten years.

Ida Lundén teaches composition at Gotland’s School of Music Composition, and is a lecturer in art with a focus on sound at Konstfack University of Arts and Craft.

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Press photos

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A contemporary composer who, with both humor and seriousness, builds her own sound worlds where everything from double basses to plastic trash on a beach finds space. With a light and fearless hand, a sure sense of form and great technical expertise, she moves freely from the simplest song to the most complex musical expressions.

From the nomination for the Nordic Council Music Prize, 2016

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hello@idalunden.se

Instagram: @idaidalunden

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10 selected projects

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Himlen viftade molnen bort (2023)

[Heaven whisked the clouds away] First performance at Dark Music Days, Reykjavik by Nordic Affect, that also commissioned the piece. A piece inspired by birch trees – the sound of wind through their leaves, their roots transformed into whisks, birch forests in Stockholm and on Iceland.
Vln, vla, vlc, hpd or pi, electronics

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Susa Donker Low (2013)

A polyglot exploration of high and low, darkness and light. Composed during my residency at the Swedish Radio P2 for eight bass singers in the Radio choir and four double bass players from the Radio symphony orchestra.

a dark, powerful and very different (choral) music that was turned up to falsetto and gave the modernist exploration of both singing and playing techniques a more thought-provoking appeal in the play with the male vocal register.

Johanna Paulsson in Dagens Nyheter, October 2013

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Punka (2020)

A piece based on a sound file from the BBC’s sound effects archive of a hangar door closing. The flute quartet plays a kind of re-creation and deconstruction of the sound before playing along with it. Punka was written during the pandemic, when one (hangar) door closes, perhaps another opens. In this case, for the lark that sang on an abandoned airfield. Commissioned by 40f.

40f opens with Ida Lundén’s work Punka, which gave the concert its name. …/ With the piece, 40f introduces us to flutes of different sizes but also to a world of sound far beyond the classical flute repertoire. Amidst all the sounds that 40f brings to life with great precision and technical brilliance, a feeling of spring and light remains, even though the music sometimes finds its inspiration from darkness of various kinds.

Tore Sjöqvist in Växjöbladet/Kronobergaren May 2023

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Pyykkipoika (2022) for Antti Lötjönen, double bass and Petri Kumela, guitar. Premiere at Hietsuu is Happening, Helsinki. The work is based on clothespins [Fin. pyykkipoika], both as musical material and instrument preparation. The work was preceded by a joint exploration of the possibilities and limitations in workshop form.

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Violin and fixed stereo sound file. Commissioned by Halla Steinun Stefansdottir.

In Skymlot – Evening Song, the connections and differences between the different sounds of a Grey-headed Bat (Vespertilio Murinus) and the violin are explored. The violin accompanies the bats into the night and sings the songs of twilight and evening – Skymlot.

The bat sounds are recorded by the musicologist Bengt Edqvist and are used with his permission. The bells in the beginning of the piece are ringing for the weekend (Vesper) and there is melodic material from an Ave Maria Antiphon (Vesper) by Josquin Des Prez.

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Urban Creatures (2022) – Interactive performance with electronic sounds by Sebastian Matthias, sound/music Ida Lundén. Premier at Theater Basel, Switzerland.
In several works together the choreographer Sebastian Matthias and I have explored various phenomena in online culture. In Urban Creatures, we started from a number of sound objects we retrieved by searching for specific tags/words on Tiktok. A large part of the performance was played in a specially built app, and the dancers wore a kind of transmitter (beacons) on their bodies. The beacons were sensitive to distance, which created a multidimensional and multichannel soundscape for up to 100 mobile phone speakers.

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Orgel (2016) Orgel is an audio visual exploration of the room and the sound in relation to an audience, where the visitors are the orchestra and a part of the piece. It consists of nine hanging organs, each has its own sound, just like a pipe organ. A playful exploration of materials and sounds that are made in a non hierarchic way together with the visitors.

The visitors enter a quiet room with nine hanging objects, they are invited to create the music by blowing in the pipes, or just watch and listen. Each organ has its own sound.

Created together with Johanna Mårtensson.

Furthermore, it allows us to query whether the prior knowledge of what an instrument looks like or is made of evokes the same reaction and attitude to the sound stimulating the spiritual experience. It reminds us how important it is to acknowledge used material in a world which is craving the production of new objects while also encouraging and nurturing meditation and wonder in a society that appears to have forgotten how to collectively contemplate.

The Vice Magazine – The Creators Project

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A collaboration with the Stockholm based music collective GLO – the Great Learning Orchestra.

…/in Lundéns ”BVMJ”…/ The innocent melody is clothed in an orchestration that becomes clearer and more majestic with each new verse, the song grows into something genuinely moving. You leave the concert with an elated feeling, befriended with an unexpected light.

Nicholas Ringskog Ferrada-Noli November 2019 in Dagens Nyheter

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