Sara Cubarsi

“There was no chance that I could wait one hundred years to play the music of today from my grave, and the violin was just the tool I had happened to learn as a child.”

Born in Barcelona, Sara has been featured as a soloist and chamber musician, as well as a performer-composer, in the United States and Europe. As a violinist, her main focus is contemporary music, but she enjoys exploring a wide variety of styles and practices – from early music on baroque violin to heavy metal on electric. Sara has performed in new music festivals such as MicroFest (Los Angeles), Darmstadt Summer Course, Lucerne Festival, and in early music festivals such as Festival d’Ambronay and Festival Torroella de Montgrí, as well as toured with the European Union Baroque Orchestra.

“The mind set that one needs to perform a new work, is the mind set that one needs to perform any kind of music from the past, or to imagine any kind of music of the future. It’s about continuously renewing dialogues, a conversation with yourself trying to interpret given material and make choices. It’s about a dialogue with another human alive (and if the composer is dead, be it Harry Partch or be it Beethoven, one must search for evidence to recreate a convincing dialogue), a dialogue with a history, a performance tradition… And of course, also with the other performers! One learns a lot about oneself and others, it’s a very existential experience. The challenge is to not get lost in these dialogues and to always keep asking new questions.”

Previous to her move to Cologne, Sara completed her doctoral studies with a full grant from “Fundació LaCaixa” at the California Institute of the Arts in 2018, where she was studying composition under Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Michael Pisaro, researching in the field of what is usually referred to as ‘microtonal music’, and modern/baroque violin with Andrew McIntosh. Sara is the winner of various prizes such as El Primer Palau (Spain), Beare Bow Prize (Royal Academy of Music) and Premi Catalunya Música, as well as a past artist in residence at La Pedrera (Barcelona). A bit further away are her more traditional performance studies, at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Tomotada Soh and Remus Azoitei, but her musical family and friends have always been her ultimate mentors.

Important influences and inspirations in Sara’s life come from a mix of artists, namely Johann Sebastian Bach, Olivier Messiaen, Joseph Beuys, Lars von Trier, Marc Sabat, and Francis Bacon. “I think the most important musical experience for me is the realization that music is an incredibly malleable concept and never static, just like other materials like wax, and that today as performers we have an important role to channel transformation. This is probably what ties these seemingly random artists, that they remind me that new music is about change, and that change can often be uncomfortable.”

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Sara Cubarsi
© Janet Sinica
Sara Cubarsi
© Janet Sinica
Sara Cubarsi
© Janet Sinica
Sara Cubarsi
© Janet Sinica