“This is a fantastic project and a new and innovative way of presenting art and science.” On Ballad of a changing World
Maja Skarding, Ballade 2018
“Cinclus Cinclus is one of the most interactive childrens concerts I have ever seen.”
Jon Turney, Jazz Wise 2019
“Maja Bugge explored loops and electronics with sound designer Hervé Perez’s field recordings in her engaging place-based project Northern.”
Ed Pinset The soundprojector 2019
“Bugge has set herself a considerable intellectual and musical challenge, and she carries it off courageously. A huge success and a unique record.“ – on “No Exit”
Julian Cowley, The Wire
“Imaginative Vitality” – on No Exit. January 2019.
Bergens Tidende, Norway
“Beautiful, meditative music”
Erlend Loe, Jury Leader, The Norwegian Arts Council
Usynlig – “This production is a site specific interactive performance created with and for children. It is innovative and crosses artistic borders. Composer Maja Bugge and theatre maker Katrine Strøm uses the library and the literature in a new and unexpected way. They also explore digital tools with great creativity.” 2010
(Usynlig won first prize for best production).
Professor Geraldine Harris, Lancaster University
“Bugge’s score was interspersed with spoken text created in collaboration with nine of her cello students who also performed the piece alongside her. This was a mixed group in numerous respects, including age, with the youngest being around nine or ten years old and the oldest in their sixties. The depth of sound and the physical impact of the reverberations created by nine cellos being played together live, is in itself a rare and pleasurable experience but the way this piece portrayed the ‘voices’ of each player (musical and actual), now giving them each their own moment and space, now weaving them together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes as dissonance, was at once complex and intricate and joyful and touching.”
Matt Robinson, Creative Director, Lancaster Jazz Festival
“Deeply moving yet experimental with an array of extended cello technique, meditative with a provocative stillness.”
Steve Mead, Artistic Director, Manchester Jazz Festival
“Maja conjures up a magical atmosphere with her deceptively simple material and the most intimate of expressive instruments: a lone ‘cello. Her music has the power to transform the space around her yet reflect and absorb it, and in doing so she creates an almost meditative-like state in the listener. We are transported into a world of undulating landscapes, distant echoes and slowly-evolving patterns by music which has the strange ability to convey – at the same time – the familiar and the unfamiliar.”