Composers

Eric Tanguy was born on January 27, 1968 in Caen. He studied music at the regional Conservatoire National in his home town (violin, chamber music, analysis, writing). In 1985, he became a pupil of the Franco-Rumanian composer Horatiu Radulescu, with whom he worked intensely until 1988. In 1986 he participated in the summer course at Darmstadt where he was to return regularly. In 1987 he studied with the French composer Gérard Grisey at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. In 1988 he continued his composition studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris with Ivo Malec and Gérard Grisey (1st prize for composition in 1991, and postgraduate studies in 1991/2). In that same year of 1988 he received the Stipendienpreis at Darmstadt, then, in 1989 the extra-mural «Villa Médicis» prize to work in London with the English composer James Dillon. In 1991 he won a scholarship from the French-German Cultural High Council. In 1992 he won the «Villa Médicis» competition as well as the Kranichstein Musikpreis at Darmstadt. He will be a boarder at the Academie de France in Rome in 1993/4. His works have had the advantage of being very widely broadcast, and have been programmed by Radio France, Süddeutschen Rundfunk, BBC, RAI, RTBF, Radio Suisse Romande and others, and by the main music festivals arond the world. At present he is composing a concerto for flute and ensemble for Pierre-Yves Artaud and a string quartet for the Quatuor Arditti.

A musician by birth and temperament, Eric Tanguy is without a doubt the most interesting young French composer, and one of the most remarkable of his generation in Europe. To date he has written some thirty works, of which the most important are Culte for solo flute (1986), Erleben, for eight instrumentalists (1988), Inwards for brass and percussion (1989), Convulsive Beauty for cello and eight instrumentalists (1990), and Elsewhere for large orchestra (1991). Taking as his point of departure the dual experience of instrumental performance (violin) and the spectral compositional technique - based upon natural resonances - invented by Horatiu Radulescu, Tanguy rapidly found for himself a language in which reflection plays as important a role as intuition and spontaneity, and which often preserves an openness and vitality of expression which confers upon him a highly persuasive tone. Eric Tanguy attaches major importance to the concerns of formal order, and more precisely to the matching of micro-formal phenomena to overall form. The principles of transformation of the material are based upon spectral scales which evolve simultaneously with specific procedures in terms of timbre, harmony an rhythm. Tanguy gives singular emphasis to concise works as well as pieces for solo instrumentalists.

Until now, this choice of such an esperimental field has given him sufficient opportunity to enable him to fully express his own peculiar individuality. His best scores allocate a clear primordial role to density of information. Almost always subtly nuanced, and remarkably homogeneous, his music rejects facile modishness while refraining from gratuitous aggression. It expresses a youthful, vivacious nature while already showing a particularly acute sense of values and soud levels.

PATRICK SZERSNOVICZ