Pascal Dusapin

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