Ellen Arkbro is a Swedish composer and organist, born in Stockholm in 1990. She studied electronic music composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and tuning with Marc Sabat in Berlin, and in 2014 studied privately with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in New York; she also worked with Catherine Christer Hennix.
Her debut, For organ and brass (Subtext, 2017), was recorded on the 1624 Scherer organ of St Stephen’s Church in Tangermünde, Germany, an instrument whose historical temperament allows harmonic relationships unavailable on modern organs, set against a brass trio. CHORDS (2019) moved the same thinking to guitar, and later solo organ records include Sounds While Waiting and Nightclouds. Her music relies on just intonation and meantone tuning, yet she has distanced herself from the drone label, describing her focus instead as the slow passage from one chord to the next, a music she has likened to a reduced form of the blues.