“The different roles I have in music are not in conflict, but rather in a healthy symbiosis.”
Sofia Jernberg is a Swedish experimental singer, composer, improviser, and performer born in Ethiopia and raised in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Sweden. One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the voice’s instrumental possibilities: her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict conventional styles. Jernberg has traversed many musical contexts and performed in chamber operas, as a soloist with symphony orchestras, with folk musicians from around the world, in jazz and free-jazz ensembles, ad hoc with some of the world‘s greatest improvisers, and alone on stage. She performed various music-theater pieces including Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Lohengrin. Composers have written contemporary roles specifically with her in mind, such as Emily Hall’s Folie à Deux and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s UR_.