A French composer born September 17, 1954 in Orléans.
Joël-François Durand studied musicology at the University of Paris VIII and piano at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. He studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, as well as with György Ligeti and Luciano Berio at the Centre Acanthes. He continued his studies in the USA at the University of New York Stony Brook, where he was the pupil of Bülent Arel (composition) and Daria Semegen (electronic music), and he obtained a doctorate in composition in 1988.
He composes for all groupings, including orchestral music (Piano Concerto, 1993; Athanor, 2001), chamber music (Die innere Grenze, 1988; String Quartet, 2005), music for solo instrument (D’asiles déchirés for piano, 1983; Tiodhlac for clarinet, 2001) and vocal music (She or not, 1998), often with literary, poetic or philosophical references. At first influenced by European serialism (String Trio, 1981), he moved away from it and worked around the idea of the process of revelation: the work begins with the development of the musical material, the exposition being revealed only at the end.
In parallel with his activities as a composer and composition teacher at the University of Washington, he developed an arm for top of the range phonographs and founded the company Durand Tonearms LLC.
