My name is Mathilda Skonare Karlsson and I am 21 years old. I originally am from Stockholm, Sweden, and now attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. I am a voice principal, but still play the piano. Here I also have started to play the acoustic guitar and harp. I am a 4th semester Professional Music major, and I would love to take a minor in music for media. I have been on the Dean’s List all my semesters at Berklee, with a GPA of 3.796.

When I was 6 years old I started to play the classical piano and violin. When I turned ten I, after several auditions, was accepted to the grammar school “Adolf Fredrik’s Music School” in Stockholm, which is the most well known grammar school of music in Sweden. I also was accepted to another music academy after auditioning with violin as my principal instrument, but chose to attend the first mentioned school.

At “Adolf Fredrik’s” we had 7 hours of choir and music lessons per week through all the years. Hard work from my side and support from the teachers resulted in me singing solo at the school’s biggest annual concert in the “EricssonGlobe” in Stockholm. In 6th grade I after several auditions was accepted to the girl’s choir of the school, which is stated to be one of the best girl’s choirs in the world. During my time in the choir we toured in Rome, Paris, Capri, Köln, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Tartu, Riga among other places. We rehearsed four hours per week, which developed my skills within ear training, music theory and the techniques of singing extremely much.

Furthermore outside of school and the singing I took classical piano and violin lessons. When I was 13 years old I decided to really put some effort in developing myself into professional piano player, and I started to take piano lessons for Tamara Jeltova at Stockholm’s Classical Piano School.

When I applied for high schools, I applied for three different music oriented schools: Södra Latin – voice, Södra Latin – Classical Piano and Viktor Rydberg Jarlaplan – Voice. I got the best audition results to all of them. I chose to attend Viktor Rydberg Jarlaplan, where I had an hour private lesson every week. During my last year our school put up the musical “Dracula”, in which I played one of the main characters.

During the three years of high school a couple of friends and I started the band “Ahead”. We wrote our own material and gigged a lot at both private and public venues, big and small. For more info see “www.myspace.com/aheadstockholm”

During this academic year I have written a lot of new material, which I intend to record this spring. I also have taken more serious conducting classes and got accepted into Ronny Feldman and Fransisco Noya’s course “Advanced Conducting for live Orchestra”, which I am taking this semester.

This summer I intend to market my EP and also hope to work for a video game company in Sweden, to compose game music and effects. I also will continue to compose and write my own songs.