Hug abandons traditional ordering principles and procedures:
Instead, processes are at the centre of her work, often as part of an exchange with scientists. Different dimensions of time, and the breaking of boundaries – these are the subjects, such as the melting of the Rhône glacier, the creative process during a 40-hour period of sleep deprivation, or the attempt to communicate with plankton using sound. This is how unique dramatic performances are created. Sound is always in motion and thus reaches the audience: it is experienced physically and through the senses, rhizome-like, it touches and may stimulate further processes. In a phrase, which has become associated with Hug and her work, and which was coined in honour of Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage, the process is the message.
Singer & Violist, Performer, Composer, Improviser, Visual Artist, Teaching Artist/Professor
With her unique site-specific, musical-visual performances and her Son-Icons (Visual-Music), she has created a new genre of transdisciplinary, spatial-scenic music and art. She sang and played in the Rhone Glacier, in the rising waters of the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland, and in the Brazilian jungle, Mata Atlântica, etc. For her artistic work, she often chooses powerful places in nature that are also fragile or threatened with extinction.
Her Intermedia-Compositions and Spatial-Scores with Son-Icons and InterAction Notation (IAN), which Hug herself developed, offer compositional settings, the structure of which is formed by the sensory magnet of the Son-Icons, and at the same time, they provide the scope for precise interdisciplinary and intercultural interactions, which are continually developing.
«This musician of the extremes is constantly expanding the possibilities of her instrument. She has developed the soft bow technique with which she can play up to 8 voices on the instrument, and so reinvents the viola. As a vocalist, she sings over four octaves, from the undertones to the highest falsetto. With vibrating glottal beats, multi-phonics and articulations close to speech, Hug oscillates between the human voice and a hybrid siren song. She also specialises in the sound mixtures of viola and voice. Thus, her unmistakably idiosyncratic tonal language.»
Barbara Eckle, Berliner Festspiele 2013
Hug gained degrees in classical music, pedagogy, and fina arts; she won awards such as “Artist in Residence” in London, the Cité international des Arts Paris, in Berlin, Johannesburg and Shanghai, the international Fellowship of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation; 2011 she was «Artiste Étoile» at the Lucerne Festival, was nominated 2019 for the Classic:Next - Innovation Award and won the Swiss Music Prize in 2025.
Hug’s music is documented in an extensive discography of over thirty CDs, with artists including: duos with Elliott Sharp or Lucas Niggli, trios with Maggie Nicols and Caroline Kraabel or Lisa Ullén and Nina de Heney, and several albums with the improvising London Stellari String Quartet (Philipp Wachsmann, Marcio Mattos & John Edwards) etc., Son-Icon Music for choir and orchestra, and four solo albums on international
Son-Icons (Visual-Music) constitute the core of Hug’s artistic work. Her Intermedia-Compositions, Spatial-Scores, and Live-Scoring with Temporary-Son-Icons are performed by international ensembles, choirs, and orchestras, as well as interdisciplinary ensembles (including the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ensemble SuperMusique Montréal, Via-Nova Choir Munich, Lucerne Festival Academy, Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, and the Johannesburg Dance Company FATC). Son-Icons are hybrids of musical notation and art, and have received international attention as works of visual art, as well as music. Hug’s visual art is represented by curator and gallery owner Barbara Marbot of da Mihi Gallery.
Hug’s participation in the London improvisation scene has been a formative experience for all involved, in particular her work over many years with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO). Hug developed open concepts for the LIO and has worked with the SPIO (São Paulo Improvisers Orchestra), the KIO (Krakow Improvisers Orchestra), etc. There have been many fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations with theatre and opera director Jossi Wieler, photographer and film-maker Alberto Venzago, choreographer PG Sabbagha, dancer Fana Tshabalala, curator Peter Fischer, as well as cross-science projects with sleep researcher Dr Prof. Peter Achermann, music anthropologist Adel-Jing Wang, glaciologists, biologists, hydrogeologists.
Hug gives performance lectures and master classes at various art schools (McGill University Montreal, CNMAT University of California Berkeley, New York University Berlin, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, China Academy of Art Hangzhou etc.). She is a professor for improvisation and musical creation in interdisciplinary contexts at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and leads the postgraduate one-year study programme ‘Creation & Scenario in Music’ at the Zurich University of the Arts, which she herself initiated.
In addition to exhibitions in galleries and museums, her busy concert schedule as improviser, soloist, composer, and conductor of her works, takes her to major festivals in Europe, North and Latin America, Canada, South Africa, Russia, and China.
«Charlotte Hug is perhaps the most innovative artist in Switzerland: viola player, voice artist, performer, composer, visual artist. »
Pirmin Bossart JazzNMore 2019
