Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, the project’s Principal Investigator, is an Icelandic musicologist and holds a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. His primary area of interest is the history of Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to the present, and he is the author of several books on Icelandic music, including Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (Indiana University Press, 2019), which was listed as one of that year’s best books on music by Alex Ross of The New Yorker. His most recent book is Music at World’s End: Three Exiled Musicians from Nazi Germany and Austria and Their Contribution to Music in Iceland (SUNY Press, 2025). Its Icelandic version was nominated for the Icelandic Book Award in 2024.

Ingólfsson is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed articles, as well as 18 entries in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He has contributed to volumes such as Mirrors of Virtue (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017), The Nature of Nordic Music (Routledge, 2019), and Sounds Icelandic (Equinox, 2019), which he co-edited. He is also the co-editor of The Songbook of Rev. Ólafur Jónsson, an edition of 51 songs and poems by an Icelandic priest in the early seventeenth century (Árni Magnússon Institute, 2024).

Praised as “a terrific lecturer” by American Record Guide, Ingólfsson has given lectures and pre-concert talks throughout the world, including at conferences in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He was a special guest speaker at the LA Philharmonic’s Reykjavík Festival in 2017, an Erasmus guest lecturer at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, and has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University, Harvard, and Yale.

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is a three-time nominee for the Icelandic Book Award (academic/non-fiction). He is also a two-time winner of the Icelandic Music Award, for his CD recordings (with the Carmina Chamber Choir, which he founded) of music from Icelandic manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In January 2025, his recordings and research were featured in an hour-long episode of The Early Music Show on BBC Radio 3. As a pianist and harpsichordist, he has recorded several CDs and appeared in concert in Iceland, England, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the United States.

See also: www.arniheimir.com