Performers & composers

Jean-François Laporte

Jean-François Laporte takes an intuitive approach to creating music, learning through concrete experimentation with sounds. Trained first at University of Montreal (as a student of Marcelle Deschênes) then at IRCAM (in 2002-2003, where he enrolled on the program of music composition and computerization), Jean-François has built his approach of actively listening to each sound. He strives to understand its reality and its underlying structure. His music is the result of working closely with the raw materials of sounds, sounds that come from the everyday environment or from both traditional and invented instruments, regardless of hierarchy. Drawing on this diversity of sonic sources, Jean-François works in multiple musical languages.

Along with his activities as a composer, Jean-François has been developing and making new musical instruments  that produce unconventional sounds. The composer recently added robotic and computerized controls to some of his invented instruments (The Bowls), giving them new autonomy and increasing their possibilities (the Khôra sound installation). In addition to works for invented instruments Jean-François has composed a large number of work’s for conventional instruments: : À l'Ombre d'un murmure, premiered by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, le Chant de l'inaudible commissioned by the Quasar Saxophone quartet, Êkhéô, commissioned by the Trio Fibonnacci, Prana, played by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne and Procession, for its Roman organ commissioned by the Royaumont Abbey in France.

He has just finished composing a 60-minute piece, Play It Again, for unorthodox solo piano, a new choreography by Danièle Desnoyers (Le Carré des Lombes, created in Bruges in September 2005.) He is now focusing on the composition of a second string quartet for the Bozzini quartet (commissioned by the French CBC for an art residency, 2003-2004) and to a 20-minute piece for 11 musicians of the  Ensemble Itinéraire (France), which will be create in 2006-2007.

Since the year he began to be involved in music, in 1993, Jean-François has written some 60 works that have been performed in Montreal, across Canada and Europe, Japan and the United States. A number of his pieces have been commissioned by Montreal-based and international ensembles and organizations, and he has won several awards and grants from such institutions as the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

The composer has also won several awards; in  2002, Laporte received several Opus awards, which honor excellence in the Québec music community. These uncluded Composer of the years and Discovery of the year. In addition, his composition TRIBAL, his one hour piece for an orchestra (40 musicians) of invented instruments, was named Composition of the year. Also in 2002, his work Prana receive first prize in the mixed music category of the 23rd International Luigi Russolo Electroacoustic Music Competition. In 2004 his work Dans le ventre du Dragon, received first prize in the electroacoustic tape music category of the Citta Di Udine International Competition of Contemporary Music. Recently, his new piece titled Plenituude of emptinesse, was named Composition of the year at the Opus Gala.

www.jflaporte.net

Moments (20')

Will be premiered at NMD, 10. october 2006.
A new String Quartet for the Bozzini string Quartet.

Khôra

« Area surrounding an agglomeration. Indeterminate  space by opposition of man-organized space ».

Scattered accross the site, the vibrations of twenty or so invented instruments bathe the public in their movements. Tu-Yo, Bol and Pavillion Frottant, all born of an extremely simple assemblage of basic materials, bring the art of sounds back to its genesis, freed of the weight of traditional instruments and of the music associated with them. Unaltered sounds of surprising depth, without amplification nor processing, of a “hyper-real” character that borders on the unreal. No speaker nor microphone are hidden behind the vibrating membrane of the instruments.

True unfurling of a sheet of sound from which all rhythm is suppressed, in the form of a flow, a stasis, then an imperceptible vanishing, this sound installation is a tribute to the space-time dimension in all its fluidity. Music of mass and of movements, it has for motif the fluctuating evolution of similar timbres organizing themselves by accumulation and proliferation, fostering the birth of an extremely organic sound universe. Polyphony becomes one global harmony, a total timbre, and behind its quasi-static globality hide extremely lively units.

By its acoustical contribution, the location becomes a parameter in itself that can’t be dissociated from the musical manifestation. A parameter that is essential but not constraining: the listener is free to move, free to trace his own path among the multitude of sound generators, lingering at chosen places, creating his own perceptual universe from what is proposed to him.