Eivind Buene studied composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music from 1992 to 1998. Over the following two years, he was composer-in-residence with the Oslo Sinfonietta, before beginning his journey as an independent composer.

In 2000, he recorded Deaths and Entrances for the Oslo Sinfonietta’s album Faces, on which other Norwegian composers such as Trond Reinholdtsen, Maja S.K. Ratkje, and Lars Petter Hagen also appeared. This project was accompanied by a discussion on the deliberately paradoxical concept of “retromodernism,” an effort to revive a musical modernism that historically had little impact on Norwegian music. Retromodernism is distinct from modernism, which, according to retromodernism, is a closed historical phenomenon. In this respect, Buene’s pieces have aspects in common with Hagen’s work. For example, both composers rewrite old music, such as in Garland (for Matthew Locke), Schubert Lounge, and Johannes Brahms Klarinetten-Trio, both confront history and tradition, and both use the recurrent motif of ruins, as for example in Landscape with Ruins and Possible Cities.

Buene is the author of three novels and has written essays on music and literature. Spanning the two artistic disciplines, his works reveal his consistent interest in major formal progressions, whether in the composition of a musical cycle or of a novel. Literature also plays an important role in his composition, for example Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist in Stilleben (2007) and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the cycle Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes (2005-2009). Recently, Buene has written the libretti that accompany his works, such as for Blue Mountain (2014), A Posthuman Guide to the Orchestra (2018), and I dag og I morgen (Today and Tomorrow, 2023).

Since participating in the project “Again and Again and Again: Music as Site, Situation and Repetition” from 2009 to 2012, Buene has explored the question of musical context. From this project, he produced three pieces and a collection of essays. “Again and Again and Again” focused on the fact that a composer can never take for granted the venue in which a piece will be performed and must account for the museographic aspect of the concert — specifically the fact that a piece will generally be presented alongside pieces from an older repertoire. This point has caused Buene to reflect on the relationship between music and tradition. In this vein, and on a commission from Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Buene composed Blue Mountain as a melodrama — an eighteenth-century genre in which a spoken text is accompanied by an orchestra — and used its two actors to point out this orchestral context by discussing the music being played.

Buene has worked with Ensemble Musikfabrik, the Berlin Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the London Sinfonietta, among others. His works have been performed at the Donaueschingen Festival, the Centre Pompidou, and Carnegie Hall, as well as at numerous international festivals, including Ultima, Bergen International Festival, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, and Eclat.