Geoffroy Drouin

Geoffroy Drouin
Period: 2011-2012
Profession: Composer French composer born in 1970, Geoffroy Drouin trained at the Cnsm in Paris, where he worked with Gérard Grisey, Marco Stroppa and Marc-André Dalbavie. He then moved on to Royaumont, where he benefited from the support of Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey, before joining Ircam’s composition and computer science program in 2002. There, he forged many musical friendships, and was offered a collaboration with the Institute as a research composer on an orchestration assistance project. The Centre Pompidou also offered him a workshop-repertoire for his piece
Crispy Grain , created during his studies at Ircam. The piece has been performed regularly ever since. In 2005, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France commissioned him to write a work for trombone and orchestra,
Patchwork . His encounter with the TM+ ensemble led to the creation of
Feed-back , for six instrumentalists, a piece that has since been included in the ensemble’s repertoire. Then came the concerto for oboe and ensemble,
Le bruit de la trace , under the direction of ensemble 2e2m, with Didier Pateau as principal soloist. Winner of the
Fondation André Boucourechliev prize in 2008, he began a close collaboration with the ensemble Court-circuit, which featured him for two consecutive seasons. The result is
Ritenuto for eight instrumentalists. Geoffroy Drouin, who holds a doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, has been researching and reflecting on writing in parallel with his work as a composer. This is an opportunity for him to confront his musical issues with those of his contemporaries from other fields (science, philosophy), sharing with them his conviction in the contemporary relevance of thought. He has taken part in numerous colloquia, and in 2008 co-directed a new cycle of composition seminars as part of
Samedis d’Entretemps at Ircam. He currently teaches at the Conservatoire du Centre de Paris, as well as at the Université de Versailles Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines. His works are performed in France and abroad, and are the subject of numerous commissions (State, festival, radio, etc.). Winner of the Académie de France selection in Rome in 2010, he is currently a resident at the Villa Médicis for an 18-month stay. A portrait
Geoffroy Drouin’s music, rich and abundant in texture, always begins with a confrontation of the heterogeneous. This encounter with difference in the musical material is an opportunity for him to deploy his writing strategies, which will ultimately enable him to organize and musically reveal the different tensions that such a confrontation gives rise to, while ensuring their overall coherence; in short, in this virtuous and deliberate conflict of singularities, it’s a question of making the score sound. Its claimed complexity is to be understood not as a headache-inducing jumble of musical signs, but rather as the result of the emergence of an irreducible musical surface, testifying to the fruitful relationship of this initial confrontation. Geoffroy Drouin likes to think of this emergence as a trace left on the surface of the score. Perceived in the foreground by the listener, it is nonetheless marked by the imprint of underlying, subterranean operations, which apparently escape the listener, but whose presence testifies to the history of the work and its consistency.
Describing himself musically as an epicurean, his speculative writing is always driven by a thirst for sound, which he willingly consumes with bulimia. Geoffroy Drouin’s music is as sensitive to refined, sophisticated manipulation of timbres as it is to dense, committed gestural writing, playing with the exclusive techniques of various aesthetic currents. Yet far from adopting a postmodern attitude, he vehemently avoids borrowing and collage, and instead indulges in a form of elasticity in his writing that guarantees vitality and flexibility. It’s clear, then, that it’s contradiction rather than closed positions that stimulate his work. It is essentially in this resistance that his music finds its singular breath. Ensemble Court-circuit