Read something more about me and my work.

Composing, writing, teaching, inventing new ways of hearing – all are linked in the work of Joël-François Durand. As a composer, his career was launched in Europe with important prizes: a Third Prize at in the 1983 Stockhausen Competition for the piano piece “…d’asiles déchirés…,” the Kranichsteiner Preis from the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in 1990. Commissions and performances from many of today’s most significant ensembles followed – Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Jack Quartet, Quatuor Diotima, ASKO, Ensemble Recherche, musikFabrik, Talea Ensemble, Dal Niente Ensemble, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Durand is Professor of Composition at the School of Music, University of Washington, as well as Associate Director. He was awarded the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship in 2003-06.

Durand’s works are singular and powerful, combining rigorous and innovative structures with a prominent lyrical impulse.

Durand’s music and personality received critical attention in the 2005 book Joël-François Durand in the Mirror Land (University of Washington Press and Perspectives of New Music) edited by his University of Washington School of Music colleague Jonathan Bernard, which features in addition to analyses by Bernard and several of the School’s students, an innovative self-interview authored by Durand himself.

Commercial recordings of his music are available on the Auvidis-Naïve, Mode Records, Wergo, Albany Records and Soundset Recordings labels.

In 2010, Durand embarked on a new path: he designed and started commercial production of a new tonearm for record players. The Talea, as it was called, took the audio world by storm and was soon followed by two further models, the Telos and the Kairos, also aimed at the most refined audio reproduction systems. For his work at his company Durand Tonearms LLC, he was made a University of Washington Entrepreneurial Fellow in 2010.

As a guest composer and lecturer, Durand has contributed to the “Centre de la Voix” in Royaumont, France where he was co-director of the composition course in September 1993, the “Civica Scuola di Musica” in Milan, Italy (1995), the Royal Academy for Music in London, UK (1997), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (1984, 1990, 1992, 1994), the “VIII. Internationaler Meisterkurs für Komposition des Brandenburgischen Colloquiums für Neue Musik”, Rheinsberg (1998), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (2004), and Stanford University (2006), among others. In the Fall 1994 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of California at San Diego.

Durand is listed in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

At first influenced by postwar European serialism, as in the early String Trio (1980-81), Durand quickly sought to distance himself from the system by developing an interaction between pre-determined compositional processes and more spontaneously derived musical elements. The pre-determined processes often serve to define the compositional environment of a whole piece, giving it a particular sound, for example, or basic temporal proportions. Within the constraints of these large scale organizations, a number of elements are often decided freely during the actual writing. These two tendencies are set up to establish a kind of dialog with each other, during the act of composition as well as in the perceived result, so that their interaction creates a tension which the composer can use to carry the energy of the music. In works such as the Piano Concerto, Die innere Grenze, or Par le feu recueilli, for example, this interaction creates deep-seated conflicts, and the dialog is one of dramatic opposition. In the dyptich L’exil du feu / Un feu distinct, on the other hand, there is no such opposition as the two tendencies complement each other; here the whole fabric is permeated by melodic lines derived from the original material through a rigorous method of spatial projection. It is then mainly the contours that allow the melodic elements to be readily recognized even when their intervallic or rhythmic contents are radically transformed.

In his works from the mid-80s and 90s, Durand explored musical forms in which the original elements of a work were presented only the very end, instead of the more traditional exposition at the beginning (as in the series: So er, Lichtung, Die innere Grenze, L’exil du feu, Un feu distinct, and later, in Athanor). This progressive unveiling of the work’s origin supported the composer’s interest in linear and directional developments, and in the melodic dimension of music. The focus on linearity emphasizes the role of musical works as journeys, in which the auditor is guided by the music through varying densities of light and darkness, as if on a forest path, toward a specific goal. The music becomes the medium in a task of discovery, of initiation. As a result his music of this period is often characterized with an intense, introspective lyricism. More recently, Durand’s works show an interest in reassessing the role of musical history as part of the compositional process. In works such as Les raisons de forces mouvantes (1998), the String Quartet no.1 (2005), Le Tombeau de Rameau I, II , III (2008-2013), and  Tropes de : Bussy, for large orchestra (2017-18), excerpts from works of past composers appear as generative materials, either clearly on the surface or deeply hidden through structural transformations.

Influences from extra-musical fields such as literature, poetry, or philosophy abound in his work and often come to musical realization through abstract relations and intellectual re-evaluation. This distance is sometimes mirrored in the titles of his works; thus titles essentially offer a poetic environment, without necessarily giving a direct key to the musical experience.