About

Patrick Giguère, musician, composer

Patrick is a quebecois musician and composer based in Montreal. He mostly writes music for acoustic instruments, from solo to the orchestra, but is increasingly interested in improvised musical practices and makes more and more space for collaboration in his creative process. His music is simultaneously personal but designed to be shared, meditative but alive and intense, complex but direct, an object of contemplation but politically engaged. It is performed in the Americas and in Europe.

Highlights of his career include his collaborative work émettre un son, vérifier sa propre existence which was featured in the Picanto Festival of the Canadian Music Center in 2022. In 2021, Paramirabo, Vincent Ranallo and Jean-François Daigneault premiered his ambitious vocal work Lui. His piece Revealing was recorded in by François-Xavier Roth and the London Symphony Orchestra in 2020 and premiered by Susanna Mälkki in 2018 at the Barbican. He took part in the Generation 2018 Canadian Tour with ECM+ . His piece Le sel de la terre  was broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 in 2017, recorded by Thin Edge New Music Collective and awarded the 3rd Serge-Garant Prize from the Fondation Socan in 2015.

Patrick is a quebecois musician and composer based in Montreal. He mostly writes music for acoustic instruments, from solo to the orchestra, but is increasingly interested in improvised musical practices and makes more and more space for collaboration in his creative process. His music is simultaneously personal but designed to be shared, meditative but alive and intense, complex but direct, an object of contemplation but politically engaged. It is performed in the Americas and in Europe.

Highlights of his career include his collaborative work émettre un son, vérifier sa propre existence which was featured in the Picanto Festival of the Canadian Music Center in 2022. In 2021, Paramirabo, Vincent Ranallo and Jean-François Daigneault premiered his ambitious vocal work Lui. His piece Revealing was recorded in by François-Xavier Roth and the London Symphony Orchestra in 2020 and premiered by Susanna Mälkki in 2018 at the Barbican. He took part in the Generation 2018 Canadian Tour with ECM+ . His piece Le sel de la terre was broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 in 2017, recorded by Thin Edge New Music Collective and awarded the 3rd Serge-Garant Prize from the Fondation Socan in 2015. In 2016, Quatuor Bozzini premiered his work Et maintenant at the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht. He also worked with ensemble such as Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Aventa Ensemble, Exaudi and Orchestre de la francophonie. His closest collaborators are Mark McGregor, Cheryl Duvall, Daniel Añez and David Therrien Brongo.

In 2018 he completed his PhD at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK, after having studied at Université Laval. During his research, he focused on the concept duende and the values spontaneity, authenticity and exploration during a creative process. Since 2019, collaboration and improvisation are an important part of his creative process, in particular thanks to a residency at the Vila Sul Goethe Institut in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, that had a profound impact on his practice. His interest for synthesizers lead him to complete a professional development project in Montreal, Dublin and Wales in 2022. Since January 2023 he is doing a postdoctorate at Université de Montréal and Centre des musiciens du monde with a project dedicated to collaboration between musicians of different cultures.

Joe Cutler, Howard Skempton and Éric Morin were his most influential professors. He also worked, during workshops or academies, with composer such as Michael Finnissy, Ana Sokolovic, Andrew Toovey, Richard Ayres, Andrew Hamilton, Martijn Padding, Colin Matthews, Karin Renhqvist, Michel Gonneville, Sydney Hodkinson, George Tsontakis, Gary Kulesha, Chen Yi, Denys Bouliane and John Rea.

He worked for many organizations dedicated to the music of today. He founded Ensemble Lunatik in 2014 and was artistic director until 2014, was artistic director fo Erreur de type 27 from 2013 to 2015, general manager of Codes d’accès from 2018 to 2019 and and deputy administrative manager of Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville from 2019 to 2021. He is now a freelance musician.

For as long as I can remember, I felt a kind of discomfort, an insatisfaction, towards the tangible reality of the world. It took me years of travels, books and impactful encounters to understand where it was coming from, that I was not alone in feeling this and to accept it would not leave me anytime soon. This feeling that something was missing not only came from the fact that I didn’t fit in, but also from the fact that my society, Québec, in North American, in the 21st century, had stop to marvel, had capitulated in front of practical and financial concerns, had decided that existential questions were too complicated to bother with, and that all dimensions of life could be expressed in a spreadsheet.

My need to create is a direct answer to this. I need, through my musical activities, to confer to my experience of reality, and to those who play and listen to my music, a healthy dose of beauty, poetry and magic. I’m trying to fill the void with gorgeous sounds, melodies, harmonies, shared experience, intensity and complicity.

As years go by, I trust my sensibility more and more to guide me during my creative process. I try to explore freely, searching for my own wonderment, for this powerful feeling of freshness, which I then cultivate organically and communicate, in the most intense and direct way possible, to the performers and listeners of my music.

It is an intimate process that triggers a lot of self awareness and doubt but that teaches me a lot. When I compose, I have to constantly answers what on the surface seems solely musical, but which in reality is deeply intertwined with my personal life and life in general : According to which values did I made this decision ? Where am I going ? Where am I coming from exactly ? What am I trying to do here, to share ?

For me music lives on stage, through the body of musicians, and it tastes so much better when it is shared. That is why I am making more and more space to the immediacy of improvisation in my practice, why I try to think in terms of moving bodies instead of notes on a page and why I cultivate collaboration with performers when I compose. I have found it has a direct impact on the intensity and humanity of the performances of my music. I write for human beings, I trust them and I am not trying to control everything.

In this era of powerful upheavals, I am convinced that the role of artists in society is more important than ever, that the solutions to the challenges of the 21s century will not only be scientific and economic; we will need to convince, to gather and to rally around a common purpose. This is what artists can contribute to. They have the special ability to navigate between different social realities that allows them to understand opposing points of view, to be aware of the preconceptions and particularities of their own culture and to grasp what unites people. Each kind of music, each musical tradition carries a set of values and a specific way in which people interact with each other. Each musical manifestation embodies an idealized version of a society. Furthermore, music has the power to make the trivial present into a special, sacred moment, to touch and bring people together. It is an artist’s bread and butter to think outside the box, to do a lot with very little, to reinvent social realities and to build tomorrow’s society.


photos

press articles
- « L’édition 2018 débutait donc par L’inévitable idéalisme de Patrick Giguère, une œuvre aux effluves quelque peu romantiques, mais avec une inspiration toute contemporaine, ne serait-ce que par ses questionnements et ses introspections. La forme et le déploiement de cette pièce en sont les plus grandes réussites : les premiers gestes sonores étant obscurs, imprécis, maladroits et clopinant, parsemés d’accords de toute sorte au piano, et qui finissent par s’unifier, se construire, s’ordonner, se diriger vers un déploiement plus ample, vers un geste plus affirmé, une construction plus sûre et convaincante. Ce n’est certes pas un développement classique, mais le parcours se dessine avec conviction (celle de l’idéaliste) et se dirige vers une forme de fatalité (l’« inévitable » du titre !). L’œuvre permet de créer une tension sublime et absorbe l’auditeur jusqu’à sa fin, aussi abrupte qu’inévitable. » - , 2018-11-11

- « Fragmented motifs repeatedly echoed in a colourful backdrop of a bell-rung texture, as the music shimmered from its angular inception. “Understatement and touching modesty” was the composer’s description of the piece, and indeed the work was less intended for theatrics than a scene of motions. A somewhat accessible piece, it had a feel of an exposition of a lengthier work, however; certainly the work betrayed the physicality of Feldman’s calm monumentalism in its abrupt conclusion after approximately 6 minutes. » - , 2018-04-16

- « Indeed his music doesn’t sound quite likeanyone else’s. [...] There is little dynamic contrast, just a modest increase in volume as fractured, surprisingly tonal ideas pulse gently towards fulfillment. The sonority is impressive with increasingly warm textures flecked by bells and rippling low-decibel timpani. » - , 2018-04-15

- « Patrick Giguère’s work is full of intensity, ornamentation and a thirst for discovery, gleefully indulging in the allure of the non-tempered scale while plunging into the heart of the physical phenomenon of sound. » - , 2017-09-01


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- Canadian Music Center, for score