Pascal Georges Dusapin (born 29 May 1955) is a French composer. 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". Despite being a pianist, he refused to compose for the piano until 1997. 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.
Education and influences
Dusapin, born in Nancy, 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 Edgard 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.
Musical style
Instrumentation
One way in which Dusapin stands out from other contemporary composers is through his selection of certain instruments and rejection of others. Unlike even Xenakis, he avoids the use of electronics and technology in his music. Likewise, he has removed the use of percussion other than timpani from his works. Until recently, Dusapin also rejected the use of keyboard instruments, despite the fact that he plays the organ As a possible reason for Dusapin's rejection of these instruments, Stoïnova suggests, "The scale and static timbre of the piano, as well as the noisy, uniform textures of percussion are incorporated with difficulty by Dusapin into his microtonal perspective which seems to define the very essence of his dynamic melodism." Stoïnova, however, wrote this article four years before Dusapin completed the Trio Rombach (1997), for piano, violin or clarinet, and cello. This piano trio was the first work in which Dusapin incorporated piano, Dusapin combines both micro-intervals and regular intervals into melodic lines so that the listener never knows what to expect next. Even so, Dusapin manages to make his use of microtonality feel completely natural. As Stoïnova explains, "The micro-intervals and the micro-glissandi ... in such instrumental works as Inside (1980) for viola, Incisa (1982) for cello, and many other pieces are, in effect, completely integrated as different by entirely 'natural' components in extremely supple melodic progressions". Instead of composing in this way, Dusapin seems to compose measure by measure, deciding what he wants to happen next when he gets there. This process slightly alludes to the chance-like aspect of aleatory music, but Dusapin's music is so precisely composed that it cannot truly be aleatoric. Stoïnova writes, "With regard to Dusapin's music we can observe a principle of auto-organization and complexity in the compositional system through the integration or assimilation of aleatory disturbances." In other words, Dusapin lets the music go where it will, often evoking aleatory idioms, while still notating everything and maintaining control of his music. He avoids repetition and rejects stability and redundancy in music, which is yet another distinguishing feature of his music.
Tension, energy, and movement
Perhaps the most prominent and unique element of Dusapin's music is its built-in tension, energy, and sense of movement. Indeed, in his article on Dusapin, Julian Anderson cites the "enclosing tensions" and "explosive flight" as the two extremes of Dusapin's early music and claims that these idioms are what make the composer's music so highly individual. Stoïnova also emphasizes the energy that is present in Dusapin's earlier compositions, giving credit to Dusapin's use of extreme registers, flutter tongue, trills, micro-intervals, glissandi, multiphonics, rapid articulations, drastic dynamics, and continuous breathing. These unique features make Dusapin's music incredibly intense and demanding on its performers. In fact, the intensity is such that Dusapin consciously makes pieces like Musique captive (1980) have short durations (in this case, three minutes), for by their ends the musicians and listeners alike are completely exhausted. Paul Griffiths notes that Dusapin's works from the 1990s are more harmonically conceived than his previous music, and that they incorporate more folk traditions, including the use of drones and modes. He further suggests that Dusapin continued to simplify his music as he moved into the twenty-first century, and that while the composer still avoids diatonicism, he uses techniques like oscillating between two notes and constantly varying small patterns, which involve more repetition than his past music. a Strasbourg-based new music group founded by a singer and clarinetist. Ian Pace proposes that the influence of the group's clarinetist Armand Angster might be a reason for the prominence of the clarinet in much of Dusapin's music from this time period. Dusapin thus throws many musical ideas together, a concept that Pace relates to free jazz. The Arditti String Quartet recording of the piece can be heard on Spotify.
La Rivière (1979) and L'Aven (1980–81)
La Rivière (1979) and L'Aven (1980–81) are two orchestral pieces based on ideas of nature that, according to Julian Anderson, show off the "more exuberant, violent side of Dusapin's style." Indeed, in this piece Dusapin aims to realize the "movement of changing speeds, of the strength of flow." Dusapin himself classifies the work as a "staged oratorio", rather than an opera or piece of musical theatre, and in it he once again avoids repetition and continuity and seeks to freely make textural connections. The solo soprano voice is pitted against the twelve voices of the mixed chorus, who serve a number of different purposes throughout the course of the work, sometimes extending the timbre of Niobé's voice, sometimes moving in relation to the text. Pugin views Dusapin's opera as a return to the "more fruitful" style of Niobé, and cites Dusapin's vocal pieces Mimi (1986–87), Il-Li-Ko (1987), and Anacoluthe (1987) as study pieces for the creation of his first opera, particularly for the setting of the French language.
In the composer's own words: