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Winner of the Lepo Sumera Composition Award 2023, Age Veeroos obtained her master's degree cum laude in composition at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn in 2006 (under Eino Tamberg and Helena Tulve). In 2005/2006 she studied with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe Higher Music School.

 

She attended international composition courses including IRCAM Summer Course for composers in Paris (2004) and Centre Acanthes in Metz (2005), master classes with for example Salvatore Sciarrino and Georg Friedrich Haas. 2010, together with a 5-member team she took part and won the main prize in a music theatre project competition of Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin.

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“As a child I learned piano, later I also took lessons with saxophone, double bass and early music singing practice. From the year 1995, for the first time I got acquainted with new music, composers like Boulez, Ligeti, and others, performed during Contemporary Music Days of Tartu - a very rare event in Estonia those days. This experience changed my life...

Today I work as composer and teacher of composition. I am member of Estonian Composers Union and Estonian Association of Electronic Music."

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On 16 July, at the concert by Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra at the Pärnu Music Festival, composer Age Veeroos was presented with the Lepo Sumera Award for Composition, initiated by the Estonian Authors’ Society and the Estonian Composers’ Union.
"Age Veeroos is one of the most important creators of Estonian sound-modernist chamber music. The radicalism of the sound modernist turn in the 1990s was apparently completely unnoticed even by the most important composers who represented this turn, whose works still paid a certain toll on tradition in terms of form. An uncompromising seeker, Age Veeroos has spent decades exploring the meaning of a sound-based composition and rejecting all too obvious or convenient solutions. The result is a rare balance between sound and form. (...) The personal poetic expression is supported by an important layer of electronics, in the use of which Age Veeroos is one of the most consistent and determined on the Estonian music scene."

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The contemporary opera GRID, composed by Age Veeroos tells a story of life in the metropolis, showing us the anguished contrast, even oppressive conflict between the virtual and the real world. Incorporating extensive video installation with live and pre-recorded electronic music, Grid had its world premiere at the arts and culture venue Kesselhaus in Berlin, Germany 21-22 April 2011. Grid was also the winner of the main prize at the 2010 Operare Competition organised by the Berlin Contemporary Opera (ZOB - Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin). New Now Artists (ELIA NXT)

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"Taking the title literally, we can hear in its sharp points and glistening streaks of pitch a musical equivalent of shards of glinting ice, droplets of semi-melted snow, gusts of frigid wind, in an atmosphere that vividly conjures up the stiffness of deep cold. But chills come from more than just actual cold, and equally the obsessive behaviour of the players, with their spasmodic twitching, lunging and crashing – extended later on to tapping and banging on their instruments – could indicate the symptoms of a fever, or perhaps a more troubling psychological cause." 5:4 by Simon Cummings Age Veeroos - Külmking (World Première)

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