Gérard Pape
Gérard Pape is a composer of electronic music, author, and Lacanian psychologist. He is a former student of David Winkler, George Cacioppo, William Albright, and George Balch Wilson. He became the director of Les Ateliers UPIC in 1991 and in 2015 authored a French-English bi-lingual book Musipoesc: Writings About Music that was published by Éditions Michel de Maule. Pape has lived and worked in France since the early 1990s.
Biography
Gérard Pape studied clinical psychology and music simultaneously at the University of Michigan, and is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst as well as a composer. After moving to France at the beginning of the 1990s, his compositions came under the influence of the Mexican composer Julio Estrada. Estrada shares with Pape an interest in psychoanalysis and focuses on what he calls "sound fantasies"—fantasies that occur "inside the head of the composer and take the form of sequences of sounds". Pape extended Estrada's conception by treating chaos as a formal concept. For example, in his opera-in-progress, Weaveworld, Pape "employs sudden and unpredictable patterns in streams of sound in a plasma that draws from chaos models". The tape part for Makbénach I and III convolves "timbre paths", made from chains of sampled saxophone sounds, together with a dense series of grains following particular trajectories, in order to produce timbral transformations.Pape's 1995 chamber opera Monologue uses as text the Samuel Beckett play A Piece of Monologue. His most important work is Feu toujours vivant for large orchestra and 4 sampler keyboards, which was commissioned by Art Zoyd and the Orchestre national de Lille, conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus.
In 2007, Gerard Pape created the CLSI ensemble with various musicians and composers such as Olga Krashenko, Paul Méfano, Jacqueline Méfano, Lissa Meridan, Michael Kinney, Martin Phelps, Rodolphe Bourotte, Stefan Tiedje, and Jean-Baptiste Favory.
Compositions
Orchestra
Cosmos, symphony for large orchestra and tape Three Faces of Death, for orchestra Feu toujours vivant, for large orchestra and four samplersOpera and musical theater
Ivan and Rena, music drama for reciter, three vocal soloists, orchestra, and tape A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, surrealist opera for tape and slides; texts and slides by Max Ernst Monologue, chamber opera based on Samuel Beckett’s play, A Piece of Monologue, for bass voice and eight-channel tape Weaveworld, after the novel by Clive Barker- * Battle, for four vocal soloists and tape,
- * Weaveworld Prologue, for bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, horn, percussion, 2 violins, viola, cello, contrabass Les Cenci, opera in four acts, for seven vocal soloists, orchestra of 24 flutes, three percussionists, tape, and live electronics
Chamber music (with or without electronics)
Soundbook, for instruments and live electronics Tableaux, for acoustic and electronic instruments In Memoriam: George Cacioppo, for eight trombones, two percussionists, and tape- String Quartet No. 1 "Fire and Ice"
- String Quartet No. 2 "Vortex" X-Stasis, for ensemble and tape Le Fleuve du désir III, for string quartet and tape Le Fleuve du désir IV, for eight solo violins, or one violin, tape, and live electronics Makbénach I, for saxophone, ensemble, and tape Makbénach II, for saxophone and ensemble
Solo instrument (with electronics)
Recordare, for soprano recorder, live electronics, and tape Cerberus, for organ and tape That Burning Thing, for flute and tape Le Fleuve du désir V, for violin, tape, and live electronics Le Fleuve du désir VI, for viola, tape, and live electronics Le Fleuve du désir VII, for cello, tape, and live electronics Le Fleuve du désir VIII, for contrabass, tape, and live electronics Makbénach III, for saxophone, live electronics, and tape Makbénach IV, for trombone, live electronics, and tape Aquarelles, for basset horn doubling clarinet, tape, and live electronics La Naissance du son, for amplified cello For Maurizio, for amplified viola Ascension au Purgatoire, for percussion and computerVocal music
Pour un Tombeau d'Anatole, for voice, saxophones, and percussion Catachresis, for soprano and chamber orchestra La Tristesse de la lune, for baritone, soprano, and tape- Two Electro-Acoustic Songs for soprano, flute, and tape; poems by Dahlia Ravicovitch Funeral Sentences, for two sopranos, percussionist, and live electronics The Ecstasy of St. Theresa , for nine mixed voices and live electronics