Biography
Composing, writing, teaching, and inventing new ways of hearing are all linked in the work of Joël-François Durand. As a composer, his career was launched in Europe with important prizes: a Third Prize in the 1983 Stockhausen Competition for the piano piece “…d’asiles déchirés…,” the Kranichsteiner Preis from 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, Mivos Quartet, Quatuor Diotima, ASKO, Ensemble Recherche, musikFabrik, Talea Ensemble, DaNiente 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 oWashington, and became its Acting Director in 2022. He was awarded the Aura B. Morrison Endowed Professorship in 2022.
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 JoëlFrançois 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, Soundset Recordings and Kairos 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 his first model was called, took the audio world by storm and was soon followed by three further models, the Talea, the Kairos and the Tosca, 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 September 1993, the “Civica Scuola di Musica” in Milan, Italy (1995), the Royal Academy for Music in London, UK (1997), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Musik in Darmstadt (1984, 1990, 1992, 1994), the “VIII. InternationaleMeisterkurs für Komposition des Brandenburgischen Colloquiums für NeuMusik”, Rheinsberg (1998), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (2004), and Stanford University, CA (2006), the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, Paris (2025), the Universität für Darstellende Kunst, Vienna (2025) among others. In the Fall of 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 (198081), 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 define a whole piece's compositional environment, giving it 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 the perceived result, so that their interaction creates a tension that the composer can use to carry the energy of the music. In works such as the PianConcerto, Die innere Grenze, or Par le feu recueilli, for example, this interaction creates deep-seated connections, and the dialog is one of dramatic opposition. In tryptic L’exil du feu / Un feu distinct, on the other hand, there is no opposition as the two tendencies complement each other; here the whole fabric is permeated by melodic lines derived from the original material through the rigorous method of spatial projection. It is then mainly the contours that allow the melodic elements to be readily recognized even when their intervallic rhythmic contents are radically transformed.
In his works from the mid-80s and 90s, Durand explored musical forms in which the original elements of work were presented only at the very end, instead of more traditional exposition at the beginning (as in the series: So er, Lichtung, Diinnere 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 discovery, of initiation. As a result, his music of this period is often characterized by an intense, introspective lyricism. In the early 2000s, 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 StringQuartet no.1 (2005), Le Tombeau de Rameau I, II (2008-2013), and Tropes de : Bussy, for large orchestra (2017-18), excerpts from works of past composer appear as generative materials, either clearly on the surface or deeply hidden through structural transformations.
More recently, Durand has been exploring the formal and structural potentials of an acoustic phenomenon known to all musicians when they tune their instruments: the beats that occur when two tones of very close frequencies are played at the same time. Geister, schwebende Geister was the first of this series of works; the second was a work for solo violin In a weightless quiet (2020), followed by his second string quartet Canto de amigo (2020), La descente de l’ange (2022) is for Bb clarinet and violin and the third string quartet (2024). In each of these works, the beats are generated by playing a note on one of the open strings of the instruments at the same time as a similar pitch with a microtonal deviation on another string, or together with another instrument.
These works lead the listener to a more introspective experience, inside the life of the sound.
Influences from extra-musical fields such as literature, poetry, or philosophy abound in his work often coming to musical realization through abstract relations and intellectual re-evaluation. This distance is sometimes mirrored in the titles of his works which essentially offer a poetic environment, without necessarily giving a direct key to the musical experience.
