Astar T&A – Creative Duo

Astar T&A…

… are a family and creative unit of music-makers. Taja is a composer, pianist, and conductor. Anna is a poet, librettist, and songwriter. So far, we have written a number of songs in different styles, genres and instrumentations, a chamber opera, a (pocket version of a) musical, a cantata, and a variety of other smaller pieces, in different ways uniting music with texts.

We prefer to think of music as story-telling and we share a tender love for opera and musical theater that brought us to music-making some years ago. It all started from a song, which started from a poem, which started from a voice… the voice of an amazing artist who gave us light and warmth in a moment of darkness, who overturned and transformed our life through new dimensions of love, beauty, and aspiration…

We think that music should touch the heart and pierce the mind.
We think that music should bring about beauty, but also make a change.
Art is for us a way of processing the world, and a tool of empathy. 

We always try to keep together in all adventures and all creativity. More often than not, we conceive our works from the seeds that pop up in our conversations and shared brain-storming, although the actual process of writing can suggest different degrees of mutual involvement. And yes, we have each written some works (almost) independently.

We love being out in the nature, hiking, walking, swimming in the open water, and sitting by the fire. We love the North for being so immensely beautiful and wild. We love the South for being so immensely beautiful – and warm. And we love our planet – but not what people are doing to it – and to each other, for that matter. We would like to write about love and nice, funny things (and sometimes we do), but often there is too much pain in the heart from seeing the world – and we write about war, and pain, and lack of hope.