Hugi Gudmundsson (Iceland, 1977) studied composition at Reykjavik College of Music with Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson and Úlfar Ingi Haraldsson. In 2005 he finished a Masters degree in composition from the Royal Danish Academy of Music where he studied with Bent Sørensen, Hans Abrahamsen and Niels Rosing-Schow. He finished a second Masters degree (electronic music, Institute of Sonology, The Netherlands) spring 2007.
Hugi Gudmundsson has been nominated nine times for the Icelandic Music Awards and received the award in 2013 for his orchestra piece Orkestur and in 2008 for Apocrypha, for baroque ensemble and electronics. In January 2015 he received the most prestigious award given to Icelandic artists, the Optimism Award. The head of the jury is the former president of the nation and the world's first female president, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and the cash award and trophy was presented by the current president of the nation.
Among international recognitions are recommendations in both categories at the International Rostrum of Composers 2006 in Paris for Eq. IV: Windbells. His piece Händelusive received the same recommendation at the 2010 Rostrum in Lisbon as well as being nominated for the ISCM Young Composer Award in 2011. In 2014 he received the very distinguished 3-year grant from the Danish Government, awarded once a year to only one composer from each music genre.
Gudmundsson's works have been featured at many international festivals. In 2012 he was a “Distinguished Guest of Honour” at the Musicarama festival in Hong Kong. In 2011 Händelusive was performed at ISCM and the same year his string quartet Matins was performed at the 2011 MATA festival in New York. The piece was performed by the renowned JACK Quartet which subsequently commissioned a new piece from him, Three Degrees of Freedom, that was premiered in 2013. His works have been featured several times at the world's oldest contemporary music festival, Nordic Music Days, and in 2013 he won the festival's competition with his work for children, The Deacon of Dark River – a Ghost Story. The piece has been translated into four languages and is available in a version for full orchestra and narrator as well as in the original version for three instruments and narrator.
Hugi Gudmundsson lives and works full-time as a composer in Copenhagen, Denmark.
