Biography
Welcome on this website. I gathered here, for those who could be interested, documentation on my work as composer and pianist: biography, photographs, catalogue of works – with program notes, audio excerpts and scores in revew – discography, some writings… My current events (concerts, lectures, conferences, radiophonic broadcasts,…) will be regularly updated.
Member of the Ensemble Ictus, Jean-Luc Fafchamps participated in numerous projects, both as a concert pianist (premieres of works by Lindberg, Reich, Aperghis, Mernier, Leroux, Harada, Francesconi , Levinas…) but also in multi-disciplinary performances, particularly accompanying dance (multiple performances with Rosas / Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker) and theater.
He made recordings for Sub Rosa – with the Bureau des Pianistes and as a soloist – of works by Bowles, Liszt, Feldman, Dallapiccola, Duchamp, Scelsi and Berio and contributed to numerous recordings with the Ictus Ensemble and several singers.
First designed for theater and dance (with Theâtre Impopulaire, the company Bonté-Mossoux …), his work gradually shifted to pure music. His compositions were hailed by the UNESCO International Rostrum of Young Composers (Attrition for string octet) and won him the Octave des Musiques Classiques 2006. The Ictus Ensemble, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Musiques Nouvelles, the Danel quartet, Calefax, the National Orchestra of Lille, Liège Philharmonic Orchestra, Champs d’Action and David Linx, Peter Rundel, Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven, Vincent Royer, Stephane Ginsburgh, and many more performed his work. It has been on the programme of many international festivals such as Présence (Paris), Ars Musica (Brussels), Vilnius, Musique Action (Nancy), Why Note (Dijon), Musiques Démesurées (Clermont-Ferrand), Warsaw, Budapest, Venice Biennale, Sidney, Berlin, Lima, Copenhagen, …
Jean-Luc Fafchamps first devoted himself to writing for various groups in which the piano played a central role (Dynamiques, for two pianos; Melencholia si …, for two pianos and two percussions …) before his interest for non-tempered harmonies and polyphony of timbre does lead to other sound combinations (A garden, for wind quintet; Bryce, for clarinet ans string quartet; Les désordres de Herr Zœbius, for string quartet). He is currently developping several long-term projects in which his taste for paradoxical constructions and his sense of synthesis are blossoming into mutually referential pieces. Since 2000, he is working on the development of a vast network of cycles – the Sufi Letters – a manifesto for writing, stylistic openness as rhetoric and the use of analogue correspondences as the basis for a system: S(in) for ensemble, K(af) for orchestra, A(lif) for ensemble and orchestra, Z3 (Dhal) for trombone and electronics, L(am) for orchestra, K(hà )(Esquif) for string quartet and electronics… The last part of his triptych for piano Back to … was written as compulseray work for the semi-finals of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2010.
His work has been the subject of six monographic recordings for Sub Rosa: Attrition (1993); Melencholia si… (2003); KDGhZ2SA, a Six-letter Sufi Word (2012); Back to… (2013), YZ3Z2Z1S2, a Five-letter Sufi Word (Prix Snepvangers 2013) and Gentle Electronics (2015). A record of his music for small formations, ….lignes…, has also been published by Fuga Libera (2009).He teached piano, chamber music and composition. He teaches musical analysis at Arts2 (Conservatoire de Mons).