Philippe Manoury is regarded as one of the most important French composers, in addition to being a researcher and forerunner in the field of live electronics. Despite an in-depth training as a pianist and composer – he was taught by Max Deutsch (a student of Schoenberg's), Gérard Condé, Michel Philippot, and Ivan Malec, among others – he considers himself to be self-taught. “The composition must be born from an inner longing, and requires no preconditions.” Accordingly, he began his first compositional experiments on his own in parallel to his first lessons in music, and, at the age of 19, his works were already being performed at major festivals for new music. His breakthrough culminated with the premiere of his piano piece Cryptophonos in 1974, interpreted by Claude Helffer.
Following two years of teaching at Brazilian universities, his compositional interest in mathematical models brought Philippe Manoury to the Paris Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). He worked there from 1981 together with the mathematician Miller Puckette on MAX-MSP, a programming language for interactive live electronics. Between 1987 and 1991, he composed Sonus ex machina, a cycle focusing on the real-time interaction between acoustic instruments and computer-generated sounds – a topic that continues to influence his artistic work and theoretical texts.
Alongside pieces for large orchestras such as Sound and Fury, the violin concerto Synapse (2009), and Echo-Daimónon for piano, electronics, and orchestra (2012), recent years have also seen the premieres of Philippe Manoury’s string quartets (Stringendo and Tensio, both 2010; Melencolia, 2013; Fragmenti, 2016) and instrumental works with electronics (Partita I for viola, 2007; Partita II for violin, 2012; Le temps, mode d’emploi for two pianos, 2014). The moment of interaction characterises his approach – not only in smaller works or compositions featuring electronics, but also with large orchestras: he turns them into a sound laboratory where new interactive possibilities are tested, expanding music theatre as a form.
This increasingly includes the spatial arrangement of musicians in the concert hall, for example in his work In situ, awarded the Orchestral Prize in Donaueschingen in 2013. Inspired by François-Xavier Roth, who conducted the premiere, Philippe Manoury extended the composition into the Köln Trilogie, a large-scale spatial triptych for the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. After Ring (2016) and a repeat performance of In situ (2017), the trilogy was completed with LabOratorium for two singers, two actors, vocal ensemble, choir, orchestra and electronics, staged by Nicolas Stemann and premiered in May 2019. The work, which is also an expression of the explicitly political commitment to humanity, folds texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Hannah Arendt, and Georg Trakl into current events and was performed to wide acclaim in Cologne as well as at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and Paris Philharmonic. The composer had previously collaborated with director Nicolas Stemann on the music theatre project Kein Licht, based on Elfriede Jelinek’s text of the same name, which premiered at the RuhrTriennale 2017 with subsequent performances in Strasbourg, Paris, Zagreb, and Luxembourg.
In the 2019/20 season another array of premieres and reprisals were scheduled. It kicked off with the Romanian premiere of Zones de turbulences for two pianos and orchestra, performed at the George Enescu Festival by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and the Moldova Philharmonic Orchestra Iasi under Brad Lubman. This was followed by the French premiere of the flute concerto Saccades, which Philippe Manoury created during his residency as "Composer for Cologne" for Emmanuel Pahud and the Gürzenich Orchestra, and which the flutist performed in October with the Orchester Philharmonique de Radio France under Fabien Gabel.
The 2020/21 season begins with the world premiere of a fanfare for brass for the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne in November 2020. Philippe Manoury is also the current featured composer at the Casa da Música in Porto; after the world premiere of a new spatial-orchestra work for the 15th anniversary of the house had to be cancelled, his Passacaille pour Tokyo (piano: Nicolas Hodges) and B-Partita (violin: Ashot Sarkissjan) will be performed there in November in two concerts with the Remix Ensemble. A suite from Kein Licht will have its premiere in Luxembourg in May, written by Philippe Manoury for the Lucilin Ensemble and mezzo-soprano Christina Daletska. Together with Ancuza Aprodu, the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under Bruno Mantovani will launch the Concerto for Piano and Ensemble Mouvements in July at the Messiaen Festival in France.
Philippe Manoury has held various teaching and artistic positions, including at Ensemble intercontemporain (1983-1987), Conservatoire de Lyon (1987-1997), Orchestre de Paris (1995-2001), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (1998-2000), and the Scène nationale d’Orléans (2001-2003). He is professor emeritus of the University of California San Diego where he taught composition from 2004 to 2012. In 2013, he returned to his native France where he was named Professor of Composition at the Académie Supérieure de la Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. His own academy for young composers took place from 2015 to 2018 as part of the Musica Festival in Strasbourg. Following an invitation from the Collège de France, in 2017 he was also a guest lecturer at the “Chaire Annuelle de Création Artistique.”
Philippe Manoury has received numerous awards for his work. In 2014, he was named Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Philippe Manoury is a member of the honorary committee of the French-German Fund for Contemporary Music/Impuls Neue Musik. In summer 2015, he was elected as a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste.
Philippe Manoury’s works are published by Universal/Editions Durand. A collection of texts by and about the composer can be found on his blog at www.philippemanoury.com.
2020/21 season
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