Martin Arnold (composer)

Martin Arnold (born 19 August 1959 in Edmonton, Alberta) is a Canadian composer of experimental music. His music has been widely performed and commissioned by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, the pianist Eve Egoyan, the violinist Mira Benjamin and the cellist Anton Lukoszievieze. Arnold won the €35,000 Open Ear Prize for Music Composition in 2025, awarded by the Oscillating Ear Foundation. Education and career Arnold studied at the University of Alberta, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (1981–82) and was a guest student at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (1982–83). He completed a PhD at the University of Victoria in 1995. Arnold has written about the influence of Komorous’ “aesthetic of the wonderful” on his music. Komorous developed the aesthetic with musical colleagues in the Czech Republic before emigrating to Canada in 1969. According to Komorous, another translation of the Czech word for wonderful is strange. Composers influenced by the aesthetic seek to create musical encounters with the unexpected. Arnold’s music is characterized by a sense of dislocation and discontinuity, effects which are created using atonal melodies a