Kasia Glowicka, also known as Katarina Glowicka, is an award-winning Polish composer and lecturer of computer music at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Her compositions span a range of styles in experimental, minimalism, Avant-garde, art music and contemporary classical music genres, written for orchestra, small ensembles, or solos and often accompanied by electronic music. She has also composed scores for opera, theater, ballet and film. In 2004 she married composer Henry Vega and they reside in the Netherlands. They are founding directors of the and its recording label, ARTEKsounds. Glowicka's scores are published by the Dutch institute Donemus.
As early as 1999, Glowicka's piece Gindry for bass and string orchestra won the Adam Didur All-Polish Composition Competition. In 2001, at just 23 years old, Glowicka was short-listed along with librettist Jerzy Lukosz for the Genesis Prize, from the London-based Genesis Foundation for their Opera The King's Gravedigger and an act from the piece was performed at the Almeida Theatre. She has also been recognized by the Holland Symfonia Competition, and won awards from the European Commission, the International Biennale of Modern Art Crash and the Polish Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music awards for her 1999 work "Summer's day." In 2004 she received a distinction in the Musica Sacra Polish Composers Competition. Her piece Opalescence won 1st Prize at the Bourges Competition for Electronic Music and was shortlisted for the SPNM awards in 2006. A few of the many commissions Glowicka received for her works have come from the Society of Promotion of New Music in London for the BBC Scottish Ensemble to perform the piece Perpetuity for the ‘Sounds New’ Festival in Aberdeen and the piece was later featured in the 18th International Review of Composers in Belgrade in 2009. Another commission came from a grant by the Polish Ministry of Culture for the CD recording of "Springs and Summers." In 2012 she was commissioned to compose a piece for the New York program "On Silence" marking the centennial of John Cage’s birth, with 12 other composers who were asked, "to reflect on what Cage means in their creative life."
Glowicka held an Artistic Residency at the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, composing and performing pieces that included traditional instruments, live video and electronics. In 2009 she presented the piece Quasi Rublev, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 film Andrei Rublev, with Goska Isphording playing harpsichord and Roos Theuws performing live visuals. Together with video artist Emmanuel Flores, Glowicka presented Turbulence performed solely by computer and visuals, noting the influence of Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch. In 2010 Glowicka and Flores collaborated again with the 15 minute performance piece RETINa inspired by the pioneering science of Étienne-Jules Marey that impacted cinema and the early documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov.
Style
Glowicka's distinct style of composition has been described as having the "specific power of expression and coloring," through using the computer as both a musical instrument and compositional tool. In a 2006 interview Glowicka said that the strongest, external influences on her music are: "technology - because I cannot write a piece now without electronics as I am fascinated by it, and science in the way that I'm structuring my pieces in order to mirror or extend natural physical phenomenon." This was later emphasized by her project notes on the piece Turbulence while in artistic residency at STEIM: "The project Turbulence is inspired by physical phenomenon – its force, unpredictability and its complexity."
