About the Composer

Katharina was born and raised in Lübeck, Germany. After finishing school, she spent five years volunteering full-time — using music and circus arts with Swedish and refugee children on the island of Gotland, and caring for people with disabilities in Camphill Communities in Co. Kilkenny, Ireland. She then studied at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden (MA MuEd, with an emphasis on Violin Pedagogy and Ensemble Conducting), and eventually settled with her family in Galway, Ireland — enjoying, along the way, the diversity and complexity of different cultures, languages and ways of living.

In Germany, she was surrounded by music from the very beginning — through family, church and school — and the violin, an instrument inherited from her grandfather, became her gateway into orchestras and, later, chamber music. It was the experience of playing together in an ensemble — the interplay of harmonies and rhythmic layers, each part feeding into something greater than itself — that sparked her curiosity as an early teen, and never left her. So when she started Coole Music & Arts in the west of Ireland in 2005, it's no surprise that ensemble playing and community spirit were at the heart of the school from the very beginning.
Katharina began composing for orchestras during her studies, and it quickly became a new passion. Once the school was up and running and its first ensembles had formed, she found herself wanting material that would truly engage her young players — with interesting harmonies and rhythms, even at the most beginner level of technique. All the Character Suites were written with her ensembles in mind — and as the players' skills grew, so did the challenge of the pieces. When friends and colleagues began using her pieces too, it became clear that the Character Suites offered something genuinely rare: expressive, imaginative compositions of real musical quality — fully accessible to players with only limited technique. Pink Petal Music grew out of these ongoing requests, and after being invited to present at national and international conferences in Sweden and Italy, Katharina's music began to spread across Europe.