Scores composed by Michel Decoust on sale directly on the publisher website. Sheet music available to order in hard copy or for immediate download.

Michel Decoust
Michel Decoust

Michel Decoust

Born in 1936 and immersed in music since his childhood, Michel Decoust committed himself entirely to this career at the end of the 1950s. His career was marked by all sorts of dualities, starting with the one that affected all scholarly music in Europe at that time: to write serially or not, to claim to belong to an avant-garde or not. An alternative that was circumvented and mastered, since Decoust was both the winner of the Prix de Rome (1963) and the cause of an aesthetic scandal, following an experimental work with atomized sounds, written for the Orchestre National and premiered in the Cathedral of Royan (1967).
Hesitating at the beginning between composing and conducting, he finally carried out both jobs at the same time, the second one until the 80s. In 1973, he created with Irène Jarsky and Martine Joste the Conservatoire de Pantin, after having participated, at the request of Marcel Landowski, in the foundation of the Orchestre des Pays de la Loire from 1967 to 1971.
In 1975, he was invited by Pierre Boulez to direct the pedagogical department of Ircam (where he was more interested in the search for new tools for analysis and pedagogy than in the computer as such). He then returned to the Ministry of Culture, where he gathered and supported multiple research studios. Michel Decoust is thus the federator of two worlds, as if his own aesthetic path (which led him from a classical training at the Conservatory to the most conceptual music, then to a true liberation from all aesthetic diktat) found there a reason to exist.
Defining himself as an “entrepreneur” and a “builder”, Michel Decoust could not but refuse any form of exclusion and chapel spirit: at the beginning, the concerts of the Domaine musical and those of the Radio also attracted him. Forty years later, he composed his first opera, without denying any of the previous stages – the voice being one of his privileged creative fields…
Hélène Pierrakos

 

 

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