about

Social media & contact: Instagram | Youtube | Soundcloud | elisabetdijkstra@me.com

I am a mixed-media composer and artist from South Africa (b.1998). I have also called Kent (UK), Doha and Paris my home, and am currently based in the North-East of England where I am studying towards a Masters degree in Composition at Durham University.

My artistic work is informed by a deep-seated interest in the relationship between hearing and seeing in musical experience. My compositional approach embraces an aesthetic of imperfection, and a belief that music is not exclusively heard – that there is something intrinsically valuable and desirable about what emerges from the interplay between music, words and the visual arts. I have started to call this ‘composing correspondences’. The term ‘correspondences’ refers to the continuous conversation between things – it is rooted in the idea that in life, art and music, ‘everything leaks and nothing is locked-in.’ The anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose writings hold profound weight in my rationale, describes correspondence as ‘a process in which things answer to one another… [which] simply means that in their growth, movement and formation… things have a certain elasticity.’ To compose correspondences, I believe, is to attend to the invisible threads that tie everything – the concrete and the abstract, the spatial and the temporal, the visual and the sonic – together, and to compose in a manner that goes beyond the abstracted and ‘perfectionist’ consideration of music as pure sound. 

My vocal piece ‘here now’ was premiered at Wigmore Hall by EXAUDI at the close of my undergraduate studies in 2021. In 2022, I won the Berwick Composition Prize with my piece, ‘A limit of hearing’, and was commissioned to write a new work as part of the Treephonia project. Collaboration is at the core of my practice, and I have been lucky to work with many incredible musicians and ensembles including EXAUDI, Distractfold, Darragh Morgan, Lucy Goddard and Siwan Rhys, Quatuor Bozzini, the Ives Ensemble and the Rothko Collective. Currently, I am working on a new work for the duo Mainly Two, and a song cycle for Lucy Goddard and Siwan Rhys. 

I am a keen violinist and pianist. I have studied at London’s Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance and the Qatar Music Academy. I have twice participated in the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival, and have extensive orchestral and concert experience. Currently, I teach violin and music theory at the Windows Music Academy in Newcastle Upon Tyne. I have recently enjoyed collaborating with composer David de la Haye as part of the Sage Gateshead foundry 2023 residency programme. 

I also have a deep love for writing. In 2019 I completed a music journalism internship with BBC Music Magazine, and in 2020 I was a copy-editor for The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts. 

Lino print for ‘Everything has two endings‘ (string trio)

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