Contributors

Grenoble-born Patrick Burgan (3/17/1960) graduated in musicology, orchestration and composition. An institut de France laureate, he spent two years (1992-1994) as composer in residence at the Casa de Velasquez (Madrid). His artistic career is punctuated by a series of awards: Simone et Cino del Duca Foundation Prize, Académie des Beaux-Arts Prize (1996), Sacem ‘Claude Arrieu’ Prize (2000).

Patrick Burgan’s music features regularly on concert programmes throughout Europe, but also in Northern America, South Africa, Indonesia and Japan among others, like the Orchestre National de France, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Accentus, Les Éléments, Musicatreize, Parnassus (New-York) etc.

Burgan’s expressive, sensual music has an undeniable dramatic character, as illustrated in his opera La source des images ou Narcisse exaucé, written in collaboration with poet Marc Blanchet. He is wrtting a new one for 2006: “Peter Pan”.

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Composing is for Patrick Burgan akin to a biological process. Just as the dividing of the cell “liberates energy”, so does his chosen means of expression “reveal the human soul”. There can be no more ontological or artificial divide between the raw sound material to be refined by the composer’s ideal (during the ‘work in progress’ phase) than between the soul and its parent body. Consequently, any artistic distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ becomes irrelevant. As human life is but a time period between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, so does a piece of music represent the setting in motion of a pre-existing fundamental force, refracted through the prism of the composer’s personality and expertise and later passed on to its listeners. Yet Patrick Burgan never forgets that the artist who strives to express beauty borders upon the absolute, which is itself not far from the sacred.

Sylviane FALCINELLI