Frédéric Acquaviva (born 20 January 1967) is a French

autodidact Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning, self-study and self-teaching) is the practice of education without the guidance of schoolmasters (i.e., teachers, professors, institutions). Overview Autodi ...

experimental

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

and

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

sound artist Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary time-based medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, ...

living between Paris, Berlin and London who works with voices, instruments, electronics, film and body sounds. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Karl Sczuka Prize for his music "ANTIPODES". In 2022, "Seminal" was presented "Hors Competition" at Phonurgia Nova for the Sound Artwork of the year. Acquaviva has been prolific on the underground/experimental music scene since 1990, working with major figures of the historical avant-garde including

Isidore Isou Isidore Isou (; 29 January 1925 – 28 July 2007), born Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, dramaturge, novelist, film director, economist, and visual artist. He was the founder of Lettrism, an art and literary movement which ...

, Marcel Hanoun,

Pierre Guyotat Pierre Guyotat (9 January 1940 – 7 February 2020) was a French literary avant-garde writer who wrote fiction, non-fiction, and plays. He is best known for his 1967 novel ''Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats'' (''Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers''), ...

Bernard Heidsieck Bernard Heidsieck (November 28, 1928 – November 22, 2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, American Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidsieck was born in Paris. In the course of his ca ...

Maurice Lemaître Maurice Lemaître (; born Moïse Maurice Bismuth; 23 April 1926 – 2 July 2018) was a French Lettrist painter (known for his use of Hypergraphy), filmmaker, writer and poet. Lemaître was Isidore Isou's right-hand man for nearly half a century ...

and Henri Chopin. as well as people from a more recent experimental scene like poets-artists Jean-Luc Parant, Joël Hubaut,

lettrist Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture ...

Broutin, poet-film maker ,

choreograph Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion or form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer creates choreographies thro ...

Maria Faustino, Maîtresse Cindy,

cello The violoncello ( , ), commonly abbreviated as cello ( ), is a middle pitched bowed (sometimes pizzicato, plucked and occasionally col legno, hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually intonation (music), tuned i ...

Anton Lukoszewieze,

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

Chihiro Ono,

trombone The trombone (, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the Standing wave, air c ...

player Thierry Madiot,

pianist A pianist ( , ) is a musician who plays the piano. A pianist's repertoire may include music from a diverse variety of styles, such as traditional classical music, jazz piano, jazz, blues piano, blues, and popular music, including rock music, ...

Mark Knoop,

harpist The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has individual string (music), strings running at an angle to its sound board (music), soundboard; the strings are plucked with the fingers. Harps can be made and played in various ways, standing ...

Helen Sharp,

flutist The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In th ...

Carin Levine Carin Levine is an American classical flautist. Life Levine studied at the University of Cincinnati with Jack Wellbaum (flute) and Peter Kamnitzer (chamber music), then from 1974 at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg with Aurèle Nicolet (flute ...

, Bartosz Glowacki (accordion) and

mezzo-soprano A mezzo-soprano (, ), or mezzo ( ), is a type of classical music, classical female singing human voice, voice whose vocal range lies between the soprano and the contralto voice types. The mezzo-soprano's vocal range usually extends from the A bel ...

Lore Lixenberg. As the creator of "chronopolyphonic" installations, he works on the notion of "oxymoron" and in the intersection of instrumental or voice with computer editing since 1990, sometimes including video-texts or live streams, mixing a conceptual approach with physical body sounds. His music pieces are thought from the compositional phase to the form of the final ''objet'', as people could see at his retrospective sound exhibition "Frédéric Acquaviva, Music & Multiples Multiple Musics" at La Plaque Tournante, Berlin, in 2017 or with the first exhibition of his magazine ''CRU'' curated by Martha Willette Lewis at Institute Library, New Haven or the comprehensive exhibition of his editions at Librarie-Galerie Lecointre et Drouet in Paris in 2018. His work has been performed in concert halls and also galleries like

Palais de Tokyo The Palais de Tokyo (''Tokyo Palace'') is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, facing the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs to ...

and

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

in Paris,

Moderna Museet Moderna Museet is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened Moderna Museet Malmö in Malmö. History The museum opened in Stockh ...

Stockholm,

Weserburg The Weserburg is a modern art museum in Bremen, Germany. Opened in 1991, it is located on the Teerhof peninsula next to the River Weser in an old factory building which was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War. Originally known a ...

Museum in Bremen, The Turbine Hall at the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

in London,

La Fenice Teatro La Fenice (; "The Phoenix Theatre") is a historic opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of "the most famous and renowned landmarks in the history of Italian theatre" and in the history of opera as a whole. Especially in the 19th cen ...

in Venice,

Fylkingen Fylkingen - New Music and Intermedia Art is an artist-run venue and member based organisation committed to contemporary experimental performing arts. Over 300 artists from various disciplines use the space to develop and present new work. Today Fy ...

in Stockholm,

Pauline Oliveros Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center ...

Deep Listening Institute The Deep Listening Band (DLB) was founded in 1988 by Pauline Oliveros (accordion, "expanded instrument system", composition), Stuart Dempster (trombone, didjeridu, composition) and Panaiotis (vocals, electronics, composer). David Gamper (keyboard ...

and

Phill Niblock Phillip Earl Niblock (October 2, 1933 – January 8, 2024) was an American composer, filmmaker, and videographer. In 1985, he was appointed director of Experimental Intermedia,Alan Licht, ''Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Music ...

Experimental Intermedia in New York, Gallery Lara Vincy in Paris, gallery WhiteBox in New York City, Le Lieu, Québec, Spor Festival in Aarhus, Futura Festival in Crest, Licences Festival in Paris, ZKM in Karlsruhe, XP in Beijing, Hamburger Bahnhof and Berghain am Kantine in Berlin, Palazzo Bertalazzone in Torino. He has also created works for radios all around the world:

France Culture France Culture () is a French public radio channel and part of Radio France Radio France () is the French national public radio broadcaster. Stations Radio France offers seven national networks: *France Inter — Radio France's "generalist ...

, Radio Libertaire, BBC-Radio3,

Resonance FM Resonance 104.4 FM is a London based non-profit community radio station specialising in the arts run by the London Musicians' Collective (LMC). The station is staffed by two permanent staff members, including Chief Executive Officer Peter Lance ...

, WGXC Radio New York,

Deutschlandradio Kultur Deutschlandfunk Kultur (; abbreviated to ''DLF Kultur'' or ''DKultur'') is a culture-oriented radio station and part of Deutschlandradio, a set of three national radio stations in Germany. Initially named ''DeutschlandRadio Berlin'', the station ...

, RadioWebMacba, Radio Canada. The music critic Franck Mallet wrote a three-page essay: "Introducing Frédéric Acquaviva" in art magazine ''Art Press'' no. 393, Paris, October 2012 and in 2018 Yoann Sarrat published a special issue of his magazine "Freeing (Our Bodies) #2" on the music of Frédéric Acquaviva with 39 contributions including Henri Chopin,

, Dorothy Iannone, ORLAN, Jacques Lizène, Michel Giroud Jean-François Bory,

Philip Corner Philip Lionel Corner (b. The Bronx, New York, April 10, 1933; name sometimes given as Phil Corner) is an American composer, trombonist, alphornist, vocalist, pianist, music theorist, music educator, and visual artist. Biography After The ...

Jean-Baptiste Favory Jean-Baptiste Favory (born 1967) is a French sound artist and composer of musique concrète, electronic and instrumental music. Biography Jean-Baptiste Favory was born in Paris in 1967. His mother, Catherine Fournet (1945), is the daughter of ...

, Bernard Heidsieck, Tom Johnson, Esther Ferrer... He received a command from the French Ministry of Culture in 1998, from ACR (France Culture) in 1999 and 2018, Motus/Palais de Tokyo in 2009 and has been in composing residency at CEIIDA (Monterrey, Mexico, 2023), Emily Harvey Foundation Venice (2009, 2011 and 2016), EMS studios in Stockholm (2015 and 2019) and also won the Beinecke Fellowship Yale University USA (2012 and 2017), as well as have been curating since 2003 more than 40 exhibitions on avant-garde art and poetry (Gil J Wolman and Isidore Isou among others) in museums such as

Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (, , MACBA, ) is a contemporary art museum situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval neighborhood, Ciutat Vella district, in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The museum opened to the public on 28 Novem ...

(MACBA),

Serralves Serralves is a cultural institution located in Porto, Portugal. It includes a contemporary art museum, a park, and a villa, with each one of these being an example of contemporary architecture, Modernism, and Art Deco architecture. The museum, d ...

Museo Reina Sofia Museo may refer to: * ''Museum'' (2018 film), Mexican drama heist film * Museo station, station on line 1 of the Naples Metro {{disambiguation ...

. In June 2019 Acquaviva was awarded the Price for Best Contemporary Art Book of the Year with his first ever monograph on Isidore Isou's artworks (Editions du Griffon) at FILAF. With voice-artist and mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg, he founded the artist and experimental music space La Plaque Tournante in Berlin in 2014, which is based on AcquAvivArchives, consisting of a massive archive of Lettrist and experimental documents or artworks from the mid 20th century to the present day, alongside Acquaviva's own music archive. La Plaque Tournante has received the Berlin Senate Prize in 2017 for one of the best artist spaces, after 12 exhibitions. He also runs the CD-DVD-Web Site-Magazine ''CRU'' (present in the collections of the

, Paris; ''MACBA'', Barcelona; ''Fondazione Bonotto'', Italy). Acquaviva has also published more than 100 publications, and apart his own musical work and multiples (published by Al Dante or Les Presses du Réel),Profile. Frédéric Acquaviva
Discogs many artist books spanning Lettrism, Body and Bio art, Sonic art and composers under the labels ''Casus Belli, Editions AcquAvivA, £@B and B@£''.

Works

*''Oeuvre'' (1990) for piano pedal *''Coma'' (1991–1992 / rev. 1995–1996), text Pierre Guyotat, for voice, computer and 16 electric guitars *''Sens Unique(s)'' (1994–1995), hörspiel for voices, 4 violins, 4 electric guitars and sampler *''K. Requiem'' (1993–1999), text , for voices, electronic and ensemble *''Tri'' (2000), chronopolyphonic sound installation *''Oreilles Vides'' (2000), for voice-computer *''Et.. et... et'' (1999/ rev. 2003), for voice, electronic and ensembles *''L'Infra Cantate'' (1998 / rev. 2004), for voice, accordion, violin and electronic *''X, 4, 3'' (2006), for 3 BDSM sound bodies and electronic *''Musique Acataleptique'' (2007), text JL Parant, for voice, house field recordings and electronic *''Exercice Spirituel'' (2007), for any sound *''4 Etudes Animales'' (2008), for toilet seat and dog *''Musique Elastique'' (2009), for elastic and Joël Hubaut *''Ledisque'' (2009), for voice *''Edisquel'' (2009), for harpischord *''Disquele'' (2009), for electronics *''Isqueled'' (2009), for voice and harpsichord *''Squeledi'' (2009), for voice and electronics *''Queledisc'' (2009), for harpsichord and electronics *''Uelediscq'' (2009), for voice, harpsichord and electronics *''Eledisq'' (2009–2010), for voice, harpsichord and electronics *''Le Disque'' (2009–2010), for voice, harpsichord, electronics and screens *' (2010), for ensemble of ensembles in extension and live streaming *''Musiques Convergentes'' (2000–2017), for various media and ensembles *''Musique Pédagogique'' (2011), for and against any audience *''Aatie-Fragment'' (2010–2011), for mezzo-soprano, variable ensemble and video *''Aatie'' (2010–2011), for mezzo-soprano, variable ensemble and video *''Musique Démotique'' (2011), for a mobile transmitter *''Musique Hiératique'' (2011), for a mobile transmitter *''Musique Cabalistique'' (2012), for a fixed receptor *''Loré Ipsum'' (2011–2012), for mezzo-soprano(s) and dead electronics *''Musique Antiparaskevidekatriaphobique et Antitriskaidekaphobique'' (2013), for a specific date *''Musique Athlétique'' (2014), for 2 break (core) dancers and mobile sound sources *''Self-Portrait Music'' (2015), for any instrument *''Musique Algorithmique'' (2015), for advertising demonstrator *''Paradoxical Sleep Music'' (2015), for voice or video *''Kiss Music'' (2015), for 2 voices *''Du Singe au Porc'' (2015), for 258 French sound sources and voice *''Ape to Pig'' (2015–2017), for 258 French sound sources, voice and videotext *''Musique Thérapeutique'' (2016), for curator and ill audience *''The 120 Day of Musica'' (2015–2017), for variable instrumentation *''mess'' (2016), for a voice artist *''MESS'' (2015–2017), for mezzo, mouths, skins, buchla and videotext *''£pØ@n®diØ$n'' (2018), concerto for town and voice *''deadline'' (2019), for voice and Jean-François Bory *''ANTIPODES'' (2019), for the voices of Joël Hubaut (+ texts), Dorothy Iannone, Loré Lixenberg; dead electronics and video *''Seminal'' (2020–2021), for speakerine (ORLAN), vocal quartet (Joan La Barbara, Loré Lixenberg, Wills Morgan, Jacques Lizène), orchestra (124 players) and dead electronics *''Musique Posthume'' (2021), for a performer and dead electronics *''Hyperosmic Music'' (2023), for dispositive *''No Soy Un Robot'' (2023), for countertenor, parrots, different voices and dead electronics *''Demoliciones / Mariachi'' (2023), 4 songs for 7 mariachis

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Acquaviva, Frédéric Living people 1967 births Place of birth missing (living people) 20th-century French classical composers Experimental composers