composer

Gérard Pape (born April 22, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York) 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 has been the director of Les Ateliers UPIC (now CCMIX) since 1991 (CCMIX Paris 2001; Makan 2003, 21). Gérard Pape studied clinical psychology and music simultaneously at the University of Michigan, and is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst as well as a composer (Makan 2003, 23–24). 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" (Makan 2003, 25). Pape extended Estrada’s conception by treating chaos as a formal concept (McHard 2006, 28). 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” (McHard 2006, 288). 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 (produced by a computer program called Cloud Generator), in order to produce timbral transformations (Feller 2000, 95; Roads 2001, 319)

Pape's 1995 chamber opera Monologue uses as text the Samuel Beckett play A Piece of Monologue (Makan 2003, 29–30). His most important work is Feu toujours vivant for large orchestra and 4 sampler keyboards (1997), which was commissioned by Art Zoyd and the National Orchestra of Lille, conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus (CCMIX Paris 2001).

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