Nirantar Yakthumba

Nirantar Yakthumba is a musician and composer from Nepal, based in the Hague, the Netherlands.

In 2023, he graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition at the Royal Conservatoire the Hague with distinction. During his bachelor’s studies, he studied composition with Peter Adriaansz, Calliope Tsoupaki, Cornelis de Bondt, and Jan van de Putte, as well as contemporary piano with Gerard Bouwhuis.

In 2025, he graduated with a Master of Music at the Institute of Sonology with distinction. He was awarded the Konrad Boehmer prize for an outstanding and original final presentation, which included his artistic work and his written thesis. In his research, he investigated the production and organization of tone, questioned the material-discursive boundaries of ‘instrumentality’, and explored the implications of information theory in collective musical practice.

In his current work, Nirantar continues exploring his interests in tone, instrument building, and collective practice from an information oriented perspective. In particular, he explores how variations in informational constraints — structure, redundancy, noise, (in)determinacy — are articulated with and within a work, and how such a practice of variation can be a technology for prompting transindividual introspection, challenging preconceived notions, and making space for difference in relational configurations.

He is the artistic director of the Kali Ensemble and is a musician in the ensemble as well as a part of the collective of artists who regularly compose for the ensemble. He has premiered and performed in a variety of works — including his own works — with the Kali Ensemble, most notably at Studio Loos, the Hague; the Lange Nacht der Neuen Musik, Düsseldorf; the Orgelpark, Amsterdam; Humboldt University, Berlin; and KM28 Berlin; among others.