Paul Méfano (March 6, 1937 – September 15, 2020), was a French
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 Defi ...
and
conductor.
Biography
Paul Méfano was born in
Basra
Basra ( ar, ٱلْبَصْرَة, al-Baṣrah) is an Iraqi city located on the Shatt al-Arab. It had an estimated population of 1.4 million in 2018. Basra is also Iraq's main port, although it does not have deep water access, which is hand ...
, Iraq. He pursued musical studies at the
École Normale de Musique de Paris
The École Normale de Musique de Paris "Alfred Cortot" (ENMP) is a leading conservatoire located in Paris, Île-de-France, France. At the time of the school's foundation in 1919 by Auguste Mangeot, Alfred Cortot. The term ''école normale'' (Engl ...
, and then later at the
Paris Conservatory
The Conservatoire de Paris (), also known as the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue ...
(CNSMP), where he was a student of Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger,
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud (; 4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as ''The Group of Six''—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions ...
, and
Georges Dandelot
Georges Édouard Dandelot (2 December 1895 – 17 August 1975) was a French composer and teacher.
Biography
Dandelot was born in Paris. His father was Alfred Dandelot, and his mother was the daughter of a piano maker. Dandelot studied at the Pari ...
. He completed his studies in
Basel
, french: link=no, Bâlois(e), it, Basilese
, neighboring_municipalities= Allschwil (BL), Hégenheim (FR-68), Binningen (BL), Birsfelden (BL), Bottmingen (BL), Huningue (FR-68), Münchenstein (BL), Muttenz (BL), Reinach (BL), Riehen (BS ...
at the courses taught by
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
,
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
, and
Henri Pousseur
Henri Léon Marie-Thérèse Pousseur (23 June 1929 – 6 March 2009) was a Belgian classical composer, teacher, and music theorist.
Biography
Pousseur was born in Malmedy and studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 1947 to ...
.
He regularly attended the concerts of the Domaine Musical, as well as the seminars at Darmstadt, and enrolled in
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically ...
's class at the CNSMP. Messiaen described Méfano as "restless, intense, and always in search of radical solutions".
In 1965 his music was performed publicly for the first time, at the Domaine Musical under the baton of
Bruno Maderna
Bruno Maderna (21 April 1920 – 13 November 1973) was an Italian conductor and composer.
Life
Maderna was born Bruno Grossato in Venice but later decided to take the name of his mother, Caterina Carolina Maderna.Interview with Maderna‘s thr ...
. From 1966 to 1968 he lived in the United States, and then in 1969 he moved to Berlin at the invitation of the
German Academic Exchange Service
The German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD (german: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), was founded in 1925 and is the largest German support organisation in the field of international academic co-operation.
Organisation
''DAAD'' is a ...
(DAAD).
In 1970 he returned to France, signed a contract with Salabert, and devoted himself to composition, to conducting, and to musical life in general. In 1972 he founded the
Ensemble 2e2m The Ensemble 2e2m is a French musical ensemble specializing in the interpretation of works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
History
The Ensemble 2e2m was founded by Paul Méfano in 1972. 2e2m means ''études et expressions des modes ...
, a group which he regularly conducted, and with which he has premièred more than five hundred works by young composers and with which he has made more than forty recordings. Amongst those younger composers are
Stéphane de Gérando, Laurent Mettraux,
Thierry Blondeau, Marc André,
Michael Finnissy
Michael Peter Finnissy (born 17 March 1946) is an English composer, pianist, and pedagogue. An immensely prolific composer, his music is "notable for its dramatic urgency and expressive immediacy".
Although he rejects the label, he is often r ...
,
James Dillon,
Bruce Mather
Bruce Mather (born May 9, 1939) is a Canadians, Canadian composer, pianist, and writer who is particularly known for his contributions to contemporary classical music. One of the most notable composers of microtonal music, he was awarded the Jule ...
, and , but he has also championed older composers such as
Jean Barraqué
Jean-Henri-Alphonse Barraqué (17 January 192817 August 1973) was a French composer and writer on music who developed an individual form of serialism which is displayed in a small output.
Life
Barraqué was born in Puteaux, Hauts-de-Seine. In 1931 ...
,
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and ...
,
Franco Donatoni
Franco Donatoni (9 June 1927 – 17 August 2000) was an Italian composer.
Biography
Born in Verona, Donatoni started studying violin at the age of seven, and frequented the local music academy. Later, he studied at the Milan Conservatory ...
,
Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono (; 29 January 1924 – 8 May 1990) was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music.
Biography
Early years
Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono beg ...
,
Aldo Clementi
Aldo Clementi (25 May 1925 – 3 March 2011) was an Italian classical composer.
Life
Aldo Clementi was born in Catania, Italy. He studied the piano, graduating in 1946 at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome. His studies in composition began ...
,
Philippe Boesmans
Philippe Boesmans (17 May 1936 – 10 April 2022) was a Belgian pianist, composer and academic teacher. He studied to be a pianist at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, and was self-taught as a composer, influenced by the Liège Group of Henri Pou ...
,
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School ...
,
Edison Denisov
Edison Vasilievich Denisov (russian: Эдисо́н Васи́льевич Дени́сов, 6 April 1929 – 24 November 1996) was a Russian composer in the so-called "Underground", "alternative" or "nonconformist" division of Soviet music.
B ...
, and
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
, as well as participating in the rediscovery of
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Charles-Valentin Alkan (; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French Jewish composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Lisz ...
and the Czech composers who were interred at Terezienstadt in 1940. He is the founder of the Editions du Mordant for the publication of contemporary music, and of the Editions Musicales Européennes (dedicated primarily to young composers), and he has produced a number of notable radio series.
In 1972 he was appointed director of the Conservatory of
Champigny-sur-Marne
Champigny-sur-Marne (, literally ''Champigny on Marne'') is a commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris.
Name
Champigny-sur-Marne was originally called simply Champigny. The name Champigny ulti ...
, a duty which he performed until 1988. He also was professor of composition and orchestration at the Paris Conservatory until 2002. One of his conducting students was the Canadian composer
Claude Vivier
Claude Vivier ( ; baptised as Claude Roger; 14 April 19487 March 1983) was a Canadian contemporary composer, pianist, poet and ethnomusicologist of Québécois origin. After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, Vivier became an i ...
.
From 1996 until 2005 he directed the Conservatory of
Versailles
The Palace of Versailles ( ; french: Château de Versailles ) is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, France. The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, u ...
.
The most important works of Paul Méfano are published and accessible at Babelscores.
In 2007, Paul Méfano became the director of the CLSI ensemble (Circle for the Liberation of Sounds & Images) with various musicians and composers like
Gérard Pape
Gérard Pape (born April 22, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York) is a composer of electronic music, author, and Lacanian psychologist. He is a former student of David Winkler, George Cacioppo, William Albright, and George Balch Wilson. He became the d ...
, Jacqueline Méfano, Olga Krashenko, Lissa Meridan, Michael Kinney, Martin Phelps, Rodolphe Bourotte, Stefan Tiedje,
Jean-Baptiste Favory.
Musical style
Méfano's compositional style has evolved considerably from his early serial work ''Incidences'' (1960) down to recent compositions which make extensive use of microtones, such as ''Speed'' (2000). His early serial style is clearly under the influence of Boulez, but the ardour of his employment of these traits "confounds the crystalline, the mirror-like and with it all suggestion of musical geometry".. He has an essentially poetic conception of music, reflected in a lifelong interest in poets and poetry. This is manifested especially in his treatment of instrumental color and in his vocal writing. He also has a special feeling for drama, as manifested in ''La cérémonie''. At the beginning of the 1970s he experimented with electronics (''La messe des voleurs''), and with its real-time combination with instruments. Though he has shown interest in the music of the
spectralist composers, his own compositions are not at all similar, and today he is regarded as a "post-spectralist" composer. Many of his works explore and develop contemporary techniques for the flute, such as in ''Captive'', ''Eventails'', ''Gradiva'', ''Traits suspendus'', or ''Ensevelie''. His earliest works (''Trois chants crépusculaires'') maintain links with tonality, to which he returned in ''Micromégas''. Since this work he has remained faithful to serial technique.
Awards
He has been awarded the following prizes and honors:
* 1971 – Prix Enesco de SACEM.
* 1980 – Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite.
* 1982 – Grand prix national de la Musique.
* 1985 – Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
* 1989 – Prix SACEM de la musique symphonique.
Catalog of works
Discography
References
Sources
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*
*
*
Further reading
* Hirsbrunner, Théo. 2001. "L'intelligibilité du texte poétique dans la composition musicale", in ''Littérature et musique dans la France contemporaine: actes du colloque des 20–22 mars 1999 en Sorbonne'', edited by Jean-Louis Backès, Claude Coste, and
Danièle Pistone
Danièle Pistone (born 1 December 1946) is a French musicologist, emeritus professor at the University Paris Sorbonne 4.
Biography
In addition to her musical studies (including piano and conducting at the and the Schola Cantorum de Paris, Pist ...
, 101–107. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001. .
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Mefano, Paul
1937 births
2020 deaths
People from Basra
French classical composers
French male classical composers
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
French male conductors (music)
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Academic staff of the Conservatoire de Paris
École Normale de Musique de Paris alumni
Knights of the Ordre national du Mérite
Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Pupils of Darius Milhaud
Pupils of Karlheinz Stockhausen
20th-century French conductors (music)
20th-century French male musicians
21st-century French conductors (music)
21st-century French male musicians