
About
Ingrid Øygard Steinkopf was born in Oslo and raised in Stanghelle in Vaksdal municipality, Norway. Growing up in a musical family sparked her interest in music, and she started learning to play the flute at the local music school at the age of six. At around ten years old she was told she had good piano fingers, so started taking lessons on piano. She also played in marching bands, sang in choir’s, and played football. At the age of 14, she wanted to explore other genres and started playing in a jazz band as well as taking lessons on jazz piano as well as slowly bringing her flute into the new genre. At the age of 15, she resumed classical piano lessons, and continued to play classical flute, jazz piano, and in a jazz band. Around this time, she and her two siblings formed a trio, called Steinkopf Trio.
Ingrid went to Kongshaug Musikkgymnas (upper secondary) with jazz piano as her main instrument, while she took private lessons in both classical flute and piano. She also got into the talent program at Griegakademiet on jazz piano and joined a jazz band with other young jazz talents. At that time, she started to explore her talent of arranging and composing, by writing arrangements on hymns.
After high school, in 2014, Steinkopf moved to Sweden to study jazz piano at Birka folkehøgskole in Østersund. There she met a lot of her future classmates; band members and good friends and the trio Briotrio was formed.
After a year in Sweden, she was accepted into the highly acknowledged jazz department at the music department at NTNU. There she got a lot of inspiration from her classmates and started a lot of bands, such as Matrjosjka, Kaopunki Papagayo and BounceAlarm. She also joined the student big band, Kjellerbandet at Studentersamfundet i Trondheim. This made a big impact on what her future endeavours would be, as well as her career with the big band style.
She finished her bachelor’s degree at the jazz department in 2018 and then picked up separate subjects, such as composition and arrangements, studio engineering, and others, for a year. In late 2018 she founded Starlight Big Band and made that one of her main projects. The following spring, she composed two pieces for the big band.
In the autumn 2019 Steinkopf started her career as a fulltime freelance musician. She now works with arranging festivals, concerts, organizing projects and bands, writing music, teaching piano and flute in addition to being a creative musician and composer.
As a composer her work has been described as original, creative, and unique in manner of orchestration, timbre, making good melodies, and harmonizing theme in an ensemble.