Atli Ingólfsson was born in Iceland on August 21, 1962. He received his first music education in the native town of Njardvik, studying guitar and harmony, and had already composed a couple of small pieces before moving to Reykjavík where he entered the theory and composition department of the Reykjavík College of Music. There he studied composition with Torkell Sigurbjörnsson and Atli Heimir Sveinsson, graduating in 1984, having also taken a final exam in guitar in 1983. He then remained one more year in Reykjavík to finish his BA degree in philosophy at the University of Iceland. After that he proceeded his composition studies in Milan with Davide Anzaghi at the Conservatorio G. Verdi, also attending a summer course with Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in 1988. In the autumn of 1988 he moved to Paris where he started attending private lessons with Gérard Grisey. After a two year stay in Paris, where he also attended the Paris Conservatory as a guest student, he moved to Bologna, however still occasionally working as assistant to Gérard Grisey. He came back to Paris for a summer course in music informatics at IRCAM in the summer of 1992. From 1990 Atli Ingólfsson has been occupied principally by composition, staying mostly in Bologna where he is among the founders of FontanaMIX, an ensemble dedicated to new music.
He was chosen by the IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain reading panel to write a piece for Midipiano and ensemble. The resulting work, Envoi, was premiered in January 1995. Besides this one, he has received commissions from several ensembles and institutes such as the Swedish Concert Institute, Nuove Sincronie in Milan, Musica nel '900 in Trento, Mirkk Art Forum in Tokyo, Ensemble l'Itinéraire in Paris, the Berlin Biennale, The Caput Ensemble, The Kroumata Ensemble, Reykjavík 2000, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, The Venice Biennale and many others. His works have been widely performed and broadcast in Europe, and particularly in the Nordic countries. Among the performers of his works, beside the aforesaid, there are the Ensemble Avanti, The Arditti Quartet, The Oslo Sinfonietta, KammarensembleN, the SISU percussion trio, James Clapperton, Håkan Hardenberger. Atli Ingólfsson was the composer in residence of the 2003 edition of the Båstad Chamber Music Festival in June 2003.
“Several of his works reflect his interest in prosody, and rhythm and metrics may be said to occupy a central role in many of them (A verso, Le pas, les pentes, Envoi, La métrique du cri). In his recent work he has increasingly explored the point of contact between timbre, harmony and rhythm, which in his first String Quartet (HZH) leads to a constant dissolution between prevalently timbral, harmonic, or rhythmic situations, all of them issued from the same structural matrix. “ (Groves Dictionnary of Music and Musicians).
A profile CD of Atli Ingólfsson’s music is being prepared at the BIS label in Stockholm.
His more recent works are published by BMG Ricordi in Milan.
CD´s: Due Bagatelle for clarinet, ITM 6-03, Reykjavík Et toi, pâle Soleil, ENMD 032, Montreuil Musubi, ITM 8-03,Reykjavík Berging (Communion) ITM 8-06, Reykjavík þrjár andrár (Three Moments) ITM 8-06, Reykjavík Vink II ITM 8-08, Reykjavík