Sunniva Rødland

Sunniva Rødland (b. 1977) is a classically trained Norwegian harpist. She is creative and innovative, with a broad repertoire. Rødland has to date premiered sixteen solo works, and she has had long-term collaborations with a number of composers, often as co-creator in the composition process. She has appeared as soloist at numerous festivals, including the World Harp Congress (Vancouver), AngelicA festival (Bologna), Ultima Contemporary Music Festival (Oslo), and Ilios (Harstad), and she has performed solo concerts with, among others, the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra. In 2015 Rødland completed a Ph.D. at the Norwegian Academy of Music under the auspices of its Artistic Research Fellowships Programme. In her project, “Let the Harp Sound!”, she researched the role of the harp in Norwegian contemporary music and offered new perspectives on the instrument. Rødland has done a number of innovative presentations using acoustic and electronic instruments, video, theatre, improvisation and installation. In addition to focusing on her solo projects, Rødland has freelanced as harpist for many years. Since the 1990s she has frequently been hired by Norwegian orchestras as an extra musician, and she has collaborated with ensembles and choirs throughout Norway. Rødland contributes to recordings of orchestras and sinfoniettas such as Ensemble Ernst, Oslo Sinfonietta and Bit20 Ensemble. She has also participated in a number of recordings with artists from other genres, for example, the jazz saxophonist Petter Wettre and pop artist Susanne Sundfør. Rødland’s other solo releases are of Mark Adderley’s “All Plans Last Only Until the First Shot — Live” (LabLabel 2016) and a DVD release of Simon Steen-Andersen’s “History of My Instrument” (Deutsche Musikrat 2020). Rødland studied harp with Willy Postma (Norwegian Academy of Music), Meinir Heulyn and Caryl Thomas (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama).