Dániel Péter Biró

Dániel Péter Biró first studied composition, theory, and guitar at the Bartók Conservatory in Budapest and then at the Bern Conservatory and Würzburg Musikhochschule. He also studied composition at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule and the Vienna University of Music. He researched Hungarian folk music at the Academy of Science in Budapest and Jewish and Islamic recitation practices in Israel and the Netherlands.

He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2004, writing a comparative study on the relationship between language and singing, oral tradition and notation, ritual and hermeneutics, with examples of Hungarian laments, Jewish Torah recitation, and early Gregorian chant. This research is reflected in his compositions, for which he has received numerous international awards.

He was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University in 2011, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–2015, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017-2018. Biró was, from 2004 to 2009, Assistant Professor and, from 2009 to 2018, Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Victoria in Canada. He was appointed Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Bergen in Norway in 2018 and was promoted to Professor of Composition in 2020.

He is currently leading the project Sounding Philosophy (2021–2025), supported by the Norwegian Artistic Research Program.

Picture: Bjarte Bjørkum