Work
Patrick Defossez began his musical career in 1985, moving to France at a time when Belgian jazz was going through a very challenging period. Over the years, he put his creative talents as a pianist to work in the contemporary music scene, composing and improvising; played with several jazz bands (trios, quintets) and directed an ensemble featuring a wide range of different instruments which was part of the jazz fusion movement.
It was after being taught by Claude Ballif in mid-1994 that he really embarked on musical composition. He produced a whole series of pieces designed to be played in situ, which were often the result of commissions and personal meetings. These saw him perform in Reims Cathedral [1] (1997), on the banks of the River Meuse (Cascades immobiles with the Septuor de Namureauphones, 2000) and in formats where he could enjoy the experience of blending genres and experiences, as in Rêves, ragas et raves (2001) performed in Nantes with the town's University Choir. To mark the bicentenary of the death of Toussaint Louverture, he wrote the music for an opera, Tous un (2003), based on the libretto by Fabienne Pasquet.
These large-scale endeavours were accompanied by chamber music compositions, which frequently involved working with instrumentalists, such as Du haut... denum digitorium (2000), performed by the bassoonist Pascal Gallois and the percussionist Samuel Favre. This is also how Re-partita /// post-ludio (2006) originated, composed at the request of violinist Jacek Friedrich, a paraphrase-remix of the prelude of the Partita for Violin N°3 by Johann-Sebastian Bach. Patrick Defossez began working on pieces that would break down the barriers between genres and give rise to innovative or hitherto untried formats. For example, two very different approaches he tried were to bring three improvisers into a string ensemble for Vernissage, dialogues et bavardages and to combine electronic sounds with a range of traditional Basque instruments for Chemin d’ombres / Matsu Camin (2006).
Patrick Defossez returned to playing piano solos in 2012. He composed Le livre de... Matin calme, a suite where he reflects upon sound and time, ‘in suspension, repeated, renewed, held in check, infinite’, a score that is ‘turned towards a thousand dawns’.
This exploratory piano work and the age-old endeavour to conduct a dialogue with other musicians come together in the project he is currently working on with composer Alain Bonardi, Contemprovisations [2] . Alain Bonardi's objective is to reinterpret the works of twelve contemporary composers: Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi, Alain Bonardi, Régis Campo, Anne-Gabriel Debaecker, Bruno Ducol, Suzanne Giraud, Thierry Huillet, Philippe Manoury, Yan Maresz, Komiko Omura, LeiLei Tian and Kasper Toeplitz.
Style
Patrick Defossez describes himself as a ‘pluriesthetic’ musician who attaches great importance both to the ‘art’ element of (so-called) contemporary classical music and to the influences derived from improvised music, from jazz and electroacoustic music. The stage environment and the physical lay-out of the venue are important parts of his work and some of his compositions (e.g. Sculpture de Muses in 2012) have been designed for specific locations. His experience as a jazz musician has led him to develop a technique of ‘improvised composition’ in which the written work is subjected to changes in real-time during the course of a concert, allowing for greater spontaneity of performance. This may be driven by purely aural considerations but also by a concern for how the playing of the piano as a visual performance is perceived.
Having studied at the Beaux-Arts, I quickly noticed that I painted music and played sculpture — Patrick Defossez
This breaking down of barriers goes beyond music, towards a form of synesthesia where words, images, sounds and space are components of the musical environment in their own right, a lesson learnt under Claude Ballif. On several occasions he has performed his music in conjunction with visual elements: paintings (Fondation Carzou) or animated works (soundtrack to a silent film), envisioning the concert to be a movement, an imbalance, a meandering, a journey, as much in the physical as in the temporal sense, one that also occurs in our mind's eye.
In the same way that his music has a transversal quality, Patrick Defossez's lyrics and the names of many of his compositions frequently display great inventiveness and something of his flamboyant, irreverent side. This helps us to understand the process of the working and re-working of raw materials [3] from which new performance gestures are born. The works of Raymond Queneau (Injectertion) and Allen Ginsberg (Libr’Air) fit naturally into this vein, but other writers who might not have been immediately associated with this environment such as Henry de Montherlant (Inès de Castro), Louis Aragon (La messe noire d’Elsa) and Jean Genet (Le funambule) have also been ‘set to music’ by Patrick Defossez.
Patrick Defossez accords much importance to the crafting of instruments and to the performance gesture, so much so that he has explored the idea of a ‘digital conservatory’ of instrumental techniques. He readily uses rare and unusual instruments in his compositions: the bass oboe, a didgeridoo, ondes Martenot, the bass flute, the double bell euphonium, the electroacoustic harp, sound-producing sculptures like the namureauphones, traditional Basque instruments etc. (but not yet a washboard!).
These ‘meslanges’ [4] are frequently joyful, blending both style and musical timbre, creating two distinct families of works, one of which tends towards the heterogeneous and the incongruous (perhaps drawing on the Belgian surrealist heritage?), while the other is an exploration of the performance gesture and the essence of musical time. In both cases, the performance gesture is crucial, this being the component around which the syntax of musical discourse revolves.
Autres voix de piano
In 2011, he became the musical director of the duo Autres Voix de piano, which he formed with Anne-Gabriel Debaecker. The first important work has been Pourquoi tant de ... ?, a framework-score designed to be modified in line with the guest musicians present. The first version of the work was developed by drummer Simon Goubert and was released as an album, receiving positive reviews. [5]
The duo then paid tribute to sculptor Parvine Curie at the Collégiale Saint-Martin, Angers as musical composition Sculpture de Muses, dance (Mathieu Ducouret), poetry (Yves Jouan and Valérie Rouzeau) and audio-visual performance art (Sylvie de Meurville) played off against each other (2012). [6]
Further on, a new version of the Pourquoi tant de ... ? framework, entitled Quatre = Onze == (7), has been elaborated with saxophonist Daniel Erdmann and trombone player Benny Sluchin, exploring the encounter of improvisation-based and classical practices of interpreting a score. The work was first played in public in October 2013 and will be released as a CD recording at the end of 2015 by the German label NEOS.
During the year 2018, he composes, with the French writer Jean-Bernard Pouy and the visual artist Mathieu Chamagne, an dystopic opera “CO2 — Cycle de lieder”, in which the audience is invited to influence an improvised musical sequence by writing narrative counterpoints to the original libretto on electronic devices. [7]
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Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called composers. Composers of primarily songs are usually called songwriters; with songs, the person who writes lyrics for a song is the lyricist. In many cultures, including Western classical music, the act of composing typically includes the creation of music notation, such as a sheet music "score", which is then performed by the composer or by other musicians. In popular music and traditional music, songwriting may involve the creation of a basic outline of the song, called the lead sheet, which sets out the melody, lyrics and chord progression. In classical music, orchestration is typically done by the composer, but in musical theatre and in pop music, songwriters may hire an arranger to do the orchestration. In some cases, a pop or traditional songwriter may not use written notation at all and instead compose the song in their mind and then play, sing or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable sound recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written or printed scores play in classical music.
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An experimental musical instrument is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components.
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