Pascal Dusapin Residency – String quartet masterclasses

Pascal Dusapin was born in Nancy, France, on 29 May 1955, and, at the age of 18, heard Arcana by Edgar Varèse at the University of Vincennes, a turning point in his life. Before then, he had a musical awakening after hearing a jazz trio while on vacation with his family, returning home with a longing to learn the clarinet. His father, however, insisted on piano lessons. When he was 10, the young Dusapin discovered the organ, an overwhelming passion that would buoy him through his chaotic and unconventional adolescence. Growing up in two environments – a small village in the Lorraine and a Paris suburb –, he embraced all genres with equal fervour, as enthusiastic about Bach as about The Doors, loving free jazz as much as Beethoven, quenching his artistic thirst on the music of the 1970s. But after his Arcana experience, he knew that he would devote all of his time and energy to composition. From 1974 to 1978, he loyally studied with Iannis Xenakis, whom he considered to be the modern descendant of Varèse. He believed that Xenakis was a master of thinking differently, broadening his horizons to include architecture and mathematics. This was his only true formal education, perhaps because Xenakis asked for nothing and gave him everything. Mr Dusapin’s first pieces, Souvenir du silence (1975) and Timée (1978), garnered the appreciation and support of two composers, Franco Donatoni and Hughes Dufourt. André Boucourechliev gave him precious advice and maxims that would stay with him throughout his career: “Never forget the instrument at the back of the orchestra” and “Sincerity is never a virtue in art.” 

In 1977, Mr Dusapin won the Fondation de la Vocation prize and, in 1981, the Villa Médicis award, where he was resident for two years while he wrote Tre Scalini, Fist and his first quartet, Niobé. He returned from Rome more determined than ever to make a living from composing and to compose while living. In the summer of 1986, he wrote Assaï for Dominique Bagouet’s ballet company, a rich collaboration both personally and artistically, and the Assaï tour took him around the world for years.

With the encouragement of Rolf Lieberman, he began composing his first opera in 1986, Roméo & Juliette, a work written in close collaboration with French writer and poet Olivier Cadiot. The opera is unconventional in plot and genre, a musical-literary revolution in which every word is chosen for its sound and rhythm, to then be woven with wholly unconstrained music. The work premiered simultaneously at the Opéra de Montpellier and the Festival d’Avignon in July 1989 before touring abroad. From that moment on, Pascal Dusapin would incorporate his love of literature into his operatic works. Cases in point: Medeamaterial, based on the work by Heiner Müller, first performed in 1991 at the Royal Theatre of La Monnaie in Brussels; To Be Sung, based on Gertrude Stein’s work, a fantastic adventure in which he involved the major mixed-media artist and light designer James Turell, and which premiered at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre in 1994; and, in 2003, Perelà, Uomo di fumo, based on Aldo Palazzeschi’s Il codice di Perelà (Man of Smoke), opened at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. Mr Dusapin went on to write the librettos for his two next operas, Faustus, The Last Night, which opened at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden in 2006, and Passion, inspired by the myth of Orpheus, which premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2008. Continuing his mise en abyme of heroes of old, he took on Heinrich von Kleist’s famed work for his opera Penthesilea, which premiered in March 2015 at La Monnaie in Brussels, from which he took a suite for soprano and orchestra, Wenn du dem Wind…, which premiered at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo in August 2014 and was performed again at the Philharmonie de Paris in March 2015.

Throughout the writing of his operas, various other works were born, including seven string quartets (the sixth with orchestra), and various vocal works such as La Melancholia, Granum Sinapis, Dona Eis and Disputatio. He also wrote Sept études pour piano, A Quia concerto for piano and seven solos for orchestra: Go, Extenso, Apex, Clam, Exeo, Reverso (premiered by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle) and Uncut. This cycle of seven orchestral forms, composed between 1991 and 2009, is a long symphonic tale of life and of human emotions and artistry. A new cycle for orchestra was in development, inspired by nature. Morning in Long Island would be the first component, suggested by the shapes of the wind. It premiered in 2010 by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Myung-Whun Chung. Amongst his more recent works are a violin concerto, Aufgang, commissioned by violinist Renaud Capuçon, his piece for piano and six instruments, Jetzt genau! and a cello concerto, Outscape, written for Alisa Weilerstein that premiered in May 2015, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His double concerto At Swim-two-birds, written for violinist Viktoria Mullova and cellist Matthew Barley, saw its premiere on 30 September 2017, played by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, followed by Gewandhaus Leipzig, the Orchestre National de France, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Pascal Dusapin has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Cino del Duca prize in 2005, and the Dan David Price in 2007. Also in 2007 he was granted the title of Academician at the Bayerische Académie in Munich and became Artistic Chairman at the Collège de France, only the second composer after Pierre Boulez to hold the position. He has published a book based on his experiences and his conferences entitled Une musique en train de se faire (“Music in the Making”, published by Seuil). In 2010 and 2011, he was Guest Professor at Musikhochschule in Munich.

Mr Dusapin’s interests and passions are many, from morphogenesis to philosophy (with a particular interest in Deleuze), from photography to architecture, from the theatre of Samuel Beckett to the work of Flaubert and others. All of these contribute to his freedom of invention and allow multiple layers of meaning, understanding and emotion in his works. He has collaborated with many different artists, combining his multidisciplinary talents with theirs: Sasha Waltz, James Turell, Peter Mussbach, Laurence Equilbey, The Accroche Note Ensemble, the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle and the Arditti Quartet. New projects have also brought him into the realm of electronics on a grand scale in such exceptional venues as the Grand Palais for the Monumenta by Richard Serra or the beach at Deauville for the city’s 150th anniversary. In November 2011, he directed his own piano and baritone cycle on poems by Nietzsche, O Mensch!, at the Paris Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. In October 2014, he imagined a visual and sound installation for the Donaueschingen Festival, “Mille Plateaux” that would then travel to other locations; in 2015, the installation was shown in the Lieu Unique, Nantes, France.

Mr Dusapin, a singular artist, continues his musical journey – formal and yet never dogmatic –, offering his fiercely emotional music through a great diversity of forms.

In 2019, Pascal Dusapin unveiled Lullaby Experience, his first work in collaboration with the IRCAM, a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, during its Festival ManiFeste. In the summer of that year, he was the guest of the Salzburg Festival, which devoted Time with Dusapin to him, a unique tribute to the artist internationally synonymous with the vitality of French musical composition. In September, his new opera Macbeth Underworld staged by Thomas Jolly premiered at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels.

On 11 November 2020, French President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron commissioned him to write the musical part of the work created for the Panthéon entombment of Maurice Genevoix. In February 2021, he was honoured at the Radio France Festival Présences.

His music is published by Editions Salabert / Universal Classical Music.