Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen. Born 1951 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Improvising musician on French horn, small instruments and voice (Group for Intuitive Music and more), composer, improvisation teacher (Aalborg University and more). Playing collaborations include John Tchicai, Steve Beresford, Blaise Siwula, Mauro Orselli, Heiner Metzger, Kumi and Yu Wakao.

 Musicians have so different ways and temperaments, why should we make them all alike? What about letting them interact and have real-time polyphony? And why should instrumentation and durations be fixed instead of flexible?

My compositional strategies for making interaction happen include the “picnic principle” (letting everybody move forward according to the same plan, but allowing for some individual variation - heterophony), setting up “creative obstacles” (at certain points demanding something difficult that may force musicians to interact, for instance synchronization of some parameter), using cues by which individual players react to specific sounds or to the overall sound, assigning different, shifting situations to individual players (for instance, forms of being active or less active - shifts as “windows” to the overall sound and possible agreement or disagreement), assigning qualities to pauses to be imagined when they are held without this having to affect what comes next (directly, at least).