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Suzanne Giraud |
éditions musicales européennes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Born in 1958, Suzanne Giraud studied music at the Strasbourg Conservatoire and later at the CNSM in Paris. Her teachers were M. Constant for orchestration, C. Ballif, H. Dufourt, T. Murail, F. Donatoni and B. Ferneyhough for composition. She trained in electroacoustic techniques and computer-assisted composition at IRCAM, UPIC workshops and GRM. She benefited from a grant from the Accademia Chigiana de Siena, spent some time in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, and attended the Darmstadt international summer course both as lecturer and guest composer. She taught harmony and counterpoint at the CNSM in Paris until 1993.
She coproduces music broadcasts on France-Musique and writes introductory notes on musical topics for the Centre Pompidou.
Prix G. Bizet (Académie des Beaux-Arts), G. Enesco (SACEM), Tribune Internationale (Unesco), selected by ISCM (twice) and the Institut Français in The Hague.
Commissioned by: Musique Nouvelle en Liberté, Radio-France, EIC, Ens. TM+, Musica, Perpignan, Dresde, Fond. L. Vuitton, Ministry of Culture.
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The most interesting composers are often those whose work holds together, entirely visible in any of its fragments, perceptible in but one note, picking up the memory of its future with each and every sound.
Suzanne Giraud belongs to that category, as was perfectly illustrated in the programme Radio France dedicated to her in the "Espace contemporain" concert series, offering the listener two pieces composed eleven years apart yet united by the same haunting poetical discourse.
La Dernière Lumière is a flayed alive painting watching its own blood trickle which gives Ivan Kovacic's poem a strong voicing and brings out all its violence. Françoise Kubler's expressionist and extremely tense singing makes the listening ear uncertain, denies it any certainty as the music rolls in. Although centered on percussions and quite linear, the piece opens up dubious and disquieting paths, reminiscent of Luciano Berio's O King.
The creation of a 1994 piece, La Musique nous vient d'ailleurs, showed the long way Suzanne Giraud has come over time. The need to cry out is as strong as ever, but there is no mention of battered bodies any longer. The composer has adopted a detached attitude and her music discovers new spaces. Her bassoon concerto Crier vers l'horizon, premiered in 1992, pointed towards such an opening out already, towards a music which, by moving away from the body, finds in its surrounding world and scenery another dimension that much better induces poise. In La Musique nous vient d'ailleurs, no more running away, rather a contemplation, a transfiguration of an imaginary fire, a "mock fire", pretext to motion and peroration. The music may fall into descriptive simplicity (the strings peremptory comments in the second part) or, on the contrary, draw elusive lines (oboe and horn dialogue in the third and last part), in a manner always most appropriate to the dramatic pupose, and well served by Jean-Marie Adrien's subtle conducting.
Jean-Guillaume Lebrun - Le Concertographe, April 1996
Suzanne Giraud's music proceeds from the poetics of experience. Inspiration braces itself against strictness, its constant support and foil. The piece draws its impulse from this tugging of tensions and manages to reach moments of simple emotion, of very personal, translucent, clarified style.
Hughes DUFOURT, April 1984
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L'oeil et le jour
- T. Miroglio (perc.), CD Salabert / MFA SCD 9411 HMCD 83
Bleu et ombre - C. Canonici (ctb.), CD Capstone Records CPS -
8628
To One In Paradise et les Envoûtements I, II, III et IV, CD MFA/Radio France
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Suzanne GIRAUD
- La Musique nous vient d'ailleurs
dans la collection Les entretiens de Bruno Serrou
préface de Olivier Py
collection Cigart
Edition
Terre-essor,
orchestra, 1984
La Dernière lumière, sop. + octet, 1985
L'Offrande à Vénus, octet, 1985
String Trio, 1991
Crier vers l'horizon, bn solo and ensemble, 1992
