Virtuoso music artists, singers, soloists, and dazzling performers are the main characters in the snapshots from the drawing pen. The caricatures illustrate vivid music rehearsals and lively concert performances. The devoted audience watches on, mostly engaged and enthusiastic but sometimes preoccupied with other matters. Musical terms such as humoresque, nocturne, and elegy are reinterpreted in the drawings; a fortissimo is delivered shrilly, and the missed entry passage is improvised if necessary.
Salbjörg Hotz was born and raised in Iceland. She studied music with a major in piano playing in Reykjavík, Iceland, and further in Vienna, Austria. She worked for a time as an instrumentalist and a piano teacher in Iceland and later in Switzerland. She lives in Switzerland, where she has been working as a freelance musician, composer, and caricaturist for several years. Her compositions have been performed in concerts in Iceland and Switzerland, and CDs with some of her works have been released in Iceland.Parallel to her music studies, she pursued her interest in drawing, further developed the drawing technique for her caricatures, and additionally attended art classes for caricature drawing in Vienna. Her caricature drawings on various subjects have appeared in booklets and pamphlets, as well as having been exhibited in Iceland, Austria, Israel, and Switzerland. A selection of her caricatures about music is published in the book "Dissonances - Caricatures of Musicians and Audiences" in German, Icelandic, and English. She describes the drawings as "some bizarre compositions without tones and a couple of random pieces without sounds."