Rafał Ryterski

Rafał Ryterski is a composer, sound designer and multimedia artist (installations, audiovisual works). He was born in 1992 in Gdynia, Poland. One hallmark of his work is the manner in which he draws upon a synthesis of various styles – a practice Ryterski describes as “genre-bending”. His art engages with issues such as identity, queer culture and mechanisms of violence. Its inter-contextual nature allows the composer to adopt a much more literal approach to that interest. Most of his pieces involve multimedia, software and physical electronic devices, whose sometimes extreme modification of the input material give him an opportunity to explore new identities for acoustic instruments, musicians and spaces.

He graduated in Composition, specialising in multimedia, from Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw (2017, studying with Krzysztof Baculewski, Barbara Okoń-Makowska, Sławomir Wojciechowski) and in Classical Composition from The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus (studying with Juliana Hodkinson, Simon Steen-Andersen and Niels Rønsholdt). He extended his education with various courses and symposia, including the Donaueschinger Musiktage’s Next Generation programme (2016, 2017) and the Darmstadt Summer Course (2016, 2018). He also teaches as a specialist in the fields of Composition, Sound Art and Music Technology. In 2017 and 2018 he worked as a composer and psychoacoustics specialist on the Nightly app and has since released two albums of electronic dance music – “Tears are the Diamonds of the Soul” (BAS, 2021), and “Gaymers’ Cheatsheet” (Pointless Geometry, 2022). Since 2020, he has collaborated on a number of works for theatre (for example with Marta Górnicka at the Maxim Gorki Theater and Krystian Lada at the Teatr Studio, Warsaw/Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar).

Ryterski’s music has been performed at numerous concerts and festivals across Europe, including Unsound (Kraków, 2019), Warsaw Autumn (2016-2022), Kunstfest Weimar (2022), Kody (Lublin, 2018), Elementi (Kraków, 2017), Darmstadt Summer Course (2018), Panorama (Aarhus, 2018-2019), Pulsår (Copenhagen, 2018, 2019), Digital Revolution in Music (Warsaw, 2015), 6th New Music Days (Gdańsk, 2016) and Idealistic (Copenhagen, 2019). He also independently produces large-scale music events, such as the concert “Atlas/Łąka” (Warsaw, 2015) in conjunction with the Academic Choir of Warsaw University, his own composition of the opera “Anonymous” (Warsaw, 2017), “Robots, Arduino and Game Over” (in collaboration with Kwartludium and Teoniki Rożynek – Kraków, Gdańsk and Warsaw, 2019) and “We’re Here” (a concert he curated in collaboration with Katarzyna Kalwat as part of Warsaw Autumn 2021, and the very first LGBTQ-focussed concert in Poland). He has created a series of multimedia installations using Max/MSP software (“Silence Inside” with Anna Sincini, 2015), SuperCollider (“Suns” with Łukasz Radziszewski, 2017) and Arduino/Raspberry Pi (“Katyń. Teoria Barw”, a stage play directed by Wojciech Faruga, with music by Teoniki Rożynek).

As of December 2022