Charlotte Hug

Composer-Performer, Improviser, Visual Artist, Media Artist, Teaching Artist

With her unique site-specific, musical-visual performances and her Son-Icons Visual Music, Charlotte Hug has created a new genre of transdisciplinary, spatial-scenic music and art. Her intermedial compositions and spatial scores with Son-Icons and Interaction Notation (IAN), which Hug herself developed, offer compositional settings, the structure of which is formed by the sensory magnet of the Son-Icons, and at the same time they provide the scope for precise interdisciplinary and intercultural interactions, which are continually developing.

Hug gained degrees in music, pedagogy, and visual arts; she won awards such as “Artist in Residence” in London, the Cité international des Arts Paris, in Berlin, Johannesburg and Shanghai, the international Fellowship of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation; she was «Artiste Etoile» at the Lucerne Festival, and was nominated for the Classic:Next – Innovation Award in 2019. Hug’s music is documented in an extensive discography of over thirty CDs, with artists including Elliott Sharp, Maggie Nicols, Lucas Niggli, with several CDs with the London Stellari String Quartet, her own choral and orchestral compositions, and three solo CDs on international labels.

Son-Icons (visual music) constitute the core of Hug’s artistic work. Her works and spatial scores are performed by international ensembles, choirs, and orchestras, as well as interdisciplinary ensembles (including the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ensemble SuperMusique Montréal, Via-Nova Choir Munich, Lucerne Festival Academy, and the Johannesburg Dance Company FATC). Son-Icons are hybrids of musical notation and art, and have received international attention as works of visual art, as well as music. Hug’s visual art is represented by curator and gallery owner Barbara Marbot of da Mihi Gallery.

Hug gives performance lectures and master classes at various art schools (MC Gill University Montreal, CNMAT University of California Berkeley, New York University Berlin, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, China Academy of Art Hangzhou etc.). She is a lecturer for improvisation in interdisciplinary contexts at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and leads the postgraduate one-year study programme ‘Creation & Scenario in Music’ at the Zurich University of the Arts, which she herself initiated.

In addition to exhibitions in galleries and museums, her busy concert schedule as improviser, soloist, composer, and conductor of her own works, takes her to major festivals in Europe, North and Latin America, Canada, South Africa, Russia, and China.

www.charlottehug.com/en/