Sara Cubarsi

Sara Cubarsi (born in Barcelona in 1991) is a violinist and performer. She studied Baroque violin, composition and performance, amongst other subjects, at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and the Academy of Music in Kraków. She studied composition with Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Michael Pisaro at CalArts, where she was awarded a PhD in 2018 with a full scholarship from La Caixa.

In her works, she explores how bringing vibrating matter into and out of synchronisation reveals the fragility of the world in which we live–particularly when attempting to stabilise vibrations through rational tuning. Acoustic and immaterial resonance processes are of great interest to her, both as a violinist and as a composer. She experiments with gut strings, instruments with resonating strings (viola d’amore, Hardanger fiddle, tromba marina) and melting wax paintings, through which Sara reflects on the materiality of tuning whilst avoiding a separation from the sensory.

As a violinist with the Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne and as a Baroque violinist on the independent scene, Sara regularly performs new music, often with her duo for early music and experimental music, ‘Lo Desconcert’. As a soloist, she has performed at venues including L’Auditori de Barcelona, El Palau de la Música Catalana and the Berlin Philharmonie.