Lika Jgerenaia

Lika Jgerenaia is a Georgian composer and sound artist. Her musical path began in early childhood through piano, classical singing and choral performance, alongside her first attempts at writing music. She participated in national and international music competitions from a young age, receiving a Special Prize at the International Contest-Festival Future Stars (Turkey)  in 2013 and recognition for artistry at the same festival in 2014. This early combination of composition and performance established a lasting connection between musical structure, vocal expression, instrumental color and the physical experience of sound.

Jgerenaia studied composition with Prof. Giorgi Shaverzashvili at the Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, where she completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. During the second year of her master’s programme, she studied composition, electroacoustic music and computer-assisted composition at the Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milan through Erasmus+, working with Prof. Gabriele Manca and Prof. José Javier Torres Maldonado. Her education has been complemented by international masterclasses and workshops in composition, orchestration, contemporary instrumental practice and electroacoustic music.

Her catalogue includes solo, chamber, vocal, ensemble and orchestral works, alongside acousmatic, electroacoustic and mixed music. Among her recent compositions is the solo cello work Saudade, which considers the coexistence of happiness and an underlying inability to experience it fully. We Survive is a fixed-media work shaped by the protests in Georgia. In Misunderstanding for oboe and fixed media, the live instrument enters into a dialogue with an electronically transformed version of itself: the oboe poses questions, while the electronics respond using material derived entirely from recorded oboe sounds. Inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther for solo bass clarinet presents a psychological confrontation between Werther and his shadow, with one instrument embodying the opposing forces of reason and impulse, resistance and despair. Her compositions have been presented in Georgia,Turkey and Italy, including performances and recording sessions at the Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire and Sala Puccini at the Conservatorio di Milano. In 2019, she received jury recognition at the Competition for the Best Musical Composition organised by the Center of Spirituality and Culture of Abkhazia in collaboration with the Creative Union of Composers of Georgia.

Her artistic practice centres on timbre, spectral and post-spectral approaches, microtonality, extended instrumental techniques and the transformation of acoustic and recorded sound. She is particularly interested in how musical material develops over time and how processes of transformation can reshape the identity of a sound. More recently, her work has expanded towards environmental listening, field recording and participatory sound collection. Through community-based sound workshops in Amantea, Italy, she has explored the relationships between sound, place, memory and collective experience.

In 2026, Jgerenaia took part in the International Workshop for Young Composers in Tbilisi, organised by IDEA and Divertimento Ensemble, where she developed and presented her solo cello work Saudade, as part of the ULYSSES Platform.