A French composer born in 1958 in Metz.
A pianist and viola player, Suzanne Giraud was trained at the Strasburg Conservatory after having been steeped in a family environment of French and German literature, painting, and the music of Haydn and Mozart. A gifted pupil, she taught the piano from the age of 16 in an MJC (a youth association for culture), then at the Strasburg Conservatory before, at the age of 19, continuing her music studies at the Paris Conservatory. She studied composition with Claude Ballif, spectral writing with Hugues Dufourt and Tristan Murail, computer music at the GRM and Ircam. She also benefited from the advice of Franco Donatoni in Sienna (1983), Brian Ferneyhough and Wolfgang Rihm in Darmstadt, and of Giacinto Scelsi during her residence at the Villa Medici (1984-86), where she could develop her penchant for the Renaissance. Her works, marked by a predilection for the percussion, the voice and strings, resonates with plastic, poetic and architectural inspiration and are exempt of any electro-acoustic element. Her works include, notably, Envoûtements I to VIII, L’offrande à Vénus (1985), Bleu et ombre (1993), Petrarca (1996), To one in paradise (1999), Qu'as-tu vu in le vaste monde? (2002), the opera Le vase de parfums (state commission 2004), Quatre fluides (2007).
