Gérard Pape


Gérard Pape is a composer of electronic music, author, and 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.

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 National Orchestra of Lille, conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus.
In 2007, Gerard Pape created the CLSI ensemble with various musicians and composers like Olga Krashenko, Paul Méfano, Jacqueline Méfano, Lissa Meridan, Michael Kinney, Martin Phelps, Rodolphe Bourotte, Stefan Tiedje, Jean-Baptiste Favory.

Compositions

Orchestra