Maarten Stragier

Maarten Stragier plays guitar, often in a room in his apartment, and sometimes on stage or in studio. He has played in apartments and on stages in the US and Europe. Some highlights were performances at Bozar and Flagey in Brussels, La Philharmonie in Paris, the Oslo Opera House, the ICA in Boston, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; and in festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tanglewood, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wien Modern, Composit, and Boston GuitarFest. 

Maarten enjoys working with composers: picking their brain and messing with their scores with utter dedication and varying degrees of deference. He has premiered compositions by Olga Neuwirth, Raphaël Cendo, Michelle Lou, Mauricio Pauly, Diana Soh, and Santiago Diez-Fischer, and he has worked with Tristan Murail, Salvatore Sciarrino, Philippe Leroux, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Wolff, and Franck Bedrossian on the interpretation of their music.

More recently, Maarten has gotten into collective creative endeavors that move past the old composer-performer paradigm. Important collaborators have been performer-composers Luca Piovesan (with whom he makes up the duo Promenade Sauvage), Mauricio Pauly, and Jessie Cox, as well as a host of non-human actors such as musical instruments, objects of all kinds and degrees of hardness, and clouds of space debris.

Maarten lives in Brussels with his wife Jenn, his son Owen, and his dog Hildie. He is a researcher and professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a member of the Young Academy of Belgium (Flanders).