A Franco-Lebanese composer born June 4, 1967 in Wadi Chahrour (Lebanon).
A pianist by training, a pupil at the Beirut Conservatory then at the Paris Conservatory, Zad Moultaka began a career as a classical soloist. Believing composing to be a space to be explored, he abandoned, in 1993, his international career as a performer in order to devote himself to composition. Trained in the rigour of Western musical composition but intrinsically tied to his Arab roots and to an oral tradition of music, he reconciled musical gesture and notation, going beyond the contingencies of both. Lying halfway between East and West, his music thus integrates duality and the fusion of genres, combinations of Western and Arab instruments, contemporary Western composition and oriental specificities (monody, modality, vocality, quarter tones, etc.), a collective memory of old and modern. Zad Moultaka has written for all formations with a predilection for the voice, a platform for his multiple experiments on its relationship to language, tone-colour, energy and micro-intervals. His works include Zàrani (2002); Zirk (2003); Khat (2007); Ligéa (2009), from Homer’s Odyssey; L’Autre rive (2009), aural reminiscences of his childhood in Beirut; Zajal (2010), a chamber opera.