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About
Mikael Karlsson lives in Harlem, NYC. He moved to New York from Sweden in 2000 and graduated Summa Cum Laude with departmental honors with a Masters Degree in classical composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music in 2005.
Mr. Karlsson’s music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, The Paris Opera, The Oslo Opera House, the Royal Swedish Opera House, The Semperoper in Dresden, Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, The Ingmar Bergman Center at Fårö, The Joyce Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and at new music festivals and opera houses across the world.
His commissions for dance include works for The Paris Opera (Play – Ekman), The Norwegian Opera and Ballet (Rooms, A Swan Lake, Resin – Ekman; Player – Proietto), Vienna State Opera (Blanc – Proietto), The Paris Opera (Play – Ekman), NDT 2 (Left Right, Left Right – Ekman), Norrdans (Black Forest, Internally Black – Carrasco), Ailey II, the Royal Swedish Opera and Ballet (Tyll, Midsummer Night’s Dream – Ekman), The Semperoper (COW – Ekman), The Swedish National Touring Theater (Paper Plane – Carrasco), and many works for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (among others Tuplet – Ekman).
He has composed for the International Contemporary Ensemble, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Callie Day, Black Sun Productions, Lydia Lunch, Claire Chase, Joshua Rubin, Mivos Quartet, Sirius Quartet, The Dahlkvist Quartet, Niklas Brommare, Blythe Gaissert, John Kelly, Lennart Mårtensson, Abby Fischer and pop singers Lykke Li, Anna von Hausswolff and Mariam Wallentin.
His first opera, The Echo Drift, premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC in 2018.
Together with Anna von Hausswolff, Mr. Karlsson composed the music for the Nobel Prize Banquet 2018. The pieces were performed by Ms. von Hausswolff, The Royal Swedish Orchestra, members from the Royal Opera Choir conducted by James Grossmith, with Mr. Karlsson on piano and pipe organ.
Mr. Karlsson has released over a dozen albums with works for orchestra, chamber works and soundtracks ranging from pop and film music to sound collages, dance scores and avant-garde concert music.
In 2007, Karlsson was included in Out Magazine’s Out 100 list of influential people. The score to his piece Nasty Fucker was published in Butt Magazine. In 2012, NYC Public Radio’s listeners voted him as one of their 100 favorite classical composers under 40. In 2016, he was one of the hosts of the highly prestigious radio show “Sommar i P1” on Swedish NPR.
In May 2014 he received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award “for an exceptional mid-career composer” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mr. Karlsson’s enjoys an ongoing working relationship with celebrated choreographer and director Alexander Ekman. Since they first started working together, in 2012, the two have presented 9 stage works – among them “Play” (Paris Opera Ballet, 2018), “Tyll” (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2012; US premiere in 2015 by the Joffrey Ballet), “A Swan Lake” (Norwegian National Ballet, 2014), “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2015), “COW” (Dresden Semperoper, 2016) and “Rooms” (Norwegian National Ballet, 2017). Karlsson composed an electronic version of the “Flocking” section from Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake for envelope-pushing fashion designer Henrik Vibskov’s SS15 at Paris Fashion Week and at Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Since 2014, Mr. Karlsson collaborates on his orchestral scores with orchestrator Michael P. Atkinson.
In 2014 Mr. Karlsson founded his own production company, Rough State Sound.