Photo: Miri Davidovitz
Elena Rykova
A composer, performance artist, and sound seeker, Elena Rykova, explores a wide variety of genres in music and visual art, ranging from interdisciplinary and performance art to chamber, ensemble, and electroacoustic music. She brings together instruments and found objects, extending one through another and creating performative musical situations, often with a strong visual aspect. Her scores are characterized by innovative use of nontraditional notation, having been exhibited in art museums internationally. She has written solo, chamber, and ensemble works, electroacoustic works, music theatre pieces, and musical performances for major new music groups around the world, as well as music for film and visual media.
She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University where she also taught composition and electroacoustic music as a Teaching Fellow.
Elena is currently based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She serves on the programmation committee of Société de Musique Contemporaine (SMC) and as a board member of Suisse Music Edition (SME).
Starting in August 2024, Rykova will take on the role of Artistic Director for the Basel-based ensemble Lemniscate, further solidifying her commitment to shaping the future of new music.
In each of my pieces, there is more than just music.
An encrypted sense.
A coded fragment of a greater meaning that I desperately search for while creating the piece.
That’s why every piece I write contains a part of me searching —
and a part of me that has found a small shard of that greater meaning.
A shard, a glimpse that gives me the strength to move forward,
that reveals something within me and gives me weight, gravity.But it’s never permanent.
You can’t keep convincing yourself with the same discovery —
you have to uncover something new each time,
add to the weight, to the meaning,
expand it.I believe this process is endless.
And perhaps the whole meaning —
we, or I, will never fully grasp.But within those moments of understanding,
there is so much power, beauty, joy, inspiration, and wholeness —
that every time it happens,
I know with absolute clarity:
these moments are worth living for.Worth living and creating,
worth continuing the path.This understanding is deeply personal —
and that’s what makes it so precious, so beautiful.
It’s not something you shout in the city square.
Sometimes, it’s not even something you can put into words.
- Elena Rykova, a page from a diary (January 6, 2020)