Pascal Dusapin

Pascal Dusapin (born 29 May 1955) is a contemporary French composer born in Nancy, France. His music is marked by its microtonality, tension, and energy.

A pupil of Iannis Xenakis and Franco Donatoni and an admirer of Varèse, Dusapin studied at the University of Paris I and Paris VIII during the 1970s. His music is full of "romantic constraint", and he rejects the use of electronics, percussion other than timpani, and, up until the late 1990s, piano. His melodies have a vocal quality, even in purely instrumental works.

Dusapin has composed solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, and choral works, as well as several operas, and has been honored with numerous prizes and awards.

Dusapin studied musicology, plastic arts, and art sciences at the University of Paris I and Paris VIII in the early 1970s. He felt a certain "shock" upon hearing Edgar Varèse’s Arcana (1927), and a similar shock when he attended Iannis Xenakis’s multimedia performance Polytope de Cluny in 1972, yet he felt "une proximité plus grande" ("a greater closeness") to the latter composer. Because of his attraction to Xenakis’s music, Dusapin studied with the composer at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he remained a student from 1974 to 1978. His classes with Xenakis included such subjects as aesthetics and science. Dusapin also studied with Italian composer Franco Donatoni, who was invited to the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) in 1976. While Dusapin’s studies with these composers formed a foundation for his compositional studies—particularly for his understanding of sound masses—he developed his own musical language. According to I. Stoïnova, "Though attached to…Varèse, Xenakis, Donatoni, Dusapin is nevertheless completely solitary because he is not only aware of his legacy, but also of the distance which separates him from his mentors: a creative distance of an aesthetic order and sensibility, a way of existing in sounds." He absorbed styles and ideas from these composers, then transformed them to fit his own musical needs.

Besides being influenced by composers such as Varèse and Xenakis who dealt with sound masses, Dusapin’s music also shows the influence of other musical traditions, including jazz. In fact, he was once a jazz pianist, though up until 1997 he refused to include piano in his compositions. Beginning in the late 1980s with his piece Aks (1987) and continuing into the 1990s, Dusapin incorporated French folk music into his musical language. In Aks, commissioned by the Société des Amis du Musé des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Dusapin immediately quotes a folk-melody, but the rest of the piece is composed independently from the folk song. Dusapin’s work from the 1990s further illustrates the influence of folk music through its frequent use of drones and use of restricted modes, though most often without obvious tonal centers. Other sources of inspiration include graphic arts and poetry.

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