Hildur Guðnadóttir (born 1982)
Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir (who is referred to as Hildur) was born in Iceland. She began playing cello as a child, and studied at the Reykjavík Music Academy, the Iceland Academy of the Arts, and Universität der Künste Berlin.
Hildur’s music is generally quiet and subtle, often with sonorities associated with the cello. She has released four solo albums, collaborated with many other artists, and composed music for film and television. Her score for Joker (2019) won an Academy Award, and her score for the TV series Chernobyl (2019) won Primetime Emmy and Grammy Awards. Here is the “Evacuation” music from Chernobyl:
Hildur’s music will appear in two high-profile films in 2022: Todd Field’s Tár starring Kate Blanchett as a composer/conductor and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking.
This is Hildur in a live performance of Erupting Light, which appeared in a shorter form on her 2009 album Without Sinking. I am not sure if she is accompanied by prerecorded sounds, or if there is an offscreen computer handling real-time capture and playback:
Hildur has been a champion of the halldorophone, a cello-like instrument created by Halldór Úlfarsson that has an electronic attachment for real-time feedback. Here is Hildur playing that instrument:
This is a music video of a haunting 2020 composition entitled Fólk fær andlit ("People get faces") written in protest of the deportation of Albanian children from Iceland in 2015: