Philippe Capdenat

Biography

Philippe Capdenat (17 July 1934 – 2 May 2025) was a French composer and academic teacher. First a mining engineer, he started composing avant-garde music, but turned to chamber music, music for the stage (opera, ballet, play music) and vocal music, using traditional instruments. He was a teacher at several French universities and conservatories.

Career

Born in Bordeaux, Capdenat attended special courses in mathematics in addition to his schooling, took piano lessons and conducted a youth choir. From 1954 to 1958 he studied mining engineering at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Saint-Étienne, where he also took classes in piano and composition at the conservatory. He served in the military in Algeria for two years. From 1960 to 1967, he worked in Paris as an engineer, but also continued to study music, with Max Deutsch at the École Normale. He was the leader of the Chorale Jéricho and the chamber orchestra Orchestre de Chambre Philippe Capdenat.
In 1967 he toured Denmark, conducting the radio orchestra of Odense. In 1968–69 he collaborated with Maurice Béjart in Brussels on the ballet Je fus cet enfant-là. In 1971, he was awarded the Hervé Dugardin Prize of the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM), and he decided to concentrate on music in 1978. He composed on commissions from Radio France, the French Ministry of Culture, the Orchestre nationale de Lille and Bordeaux, and the Grand Théâtre in Tours. He collaborated with ensembles including Ensemble Ars Nova, Domaine musical and Ensemble l'Itinéraire, with conductors such as Serge Baudo, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Patrick Fournillier and with Pascal Verrot, and with soloists including Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Sylvio Gualda, Christian Ivaldi and Mady Mesplé. From 1981 to 1991 he lectured at the Sorbonne, teaching analysis, composition, harmony and counterpoint, and also at Lyon University and Tours University (fr).
In 1992, Capdenat was appointed professor of musical analysis and composition at the École Nationale de Musique et de Danse in Montreuil. From 1995 to 2001 he was director of the department of contemporary music at the Conservatoire Nadia et Lili Boulanger in Paris. Among his students is Mansoor Hosseini. He then became president of the association for contemporary music Opus Open and continued in that post until 2010.
In 1990, he was awarded a prize for composers from SACEM, and in 1996 won a prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 2001, his opera Une Carmen, loosely based on Bizet's Carmen, re-imagined the topic in Arab-Andalusian style, with Carmen relocated to Morocco and instruments such as the oud, tablah, and quanun, played by Moroccan musicians. Directed by Olivier Desbordes, the Opéra Éclaté performed it at the Les Excentrés festival in Gap and on a national tour. In 2011, Capdenat's Variations received the first prize in the competition of the Orchestre national d'harmonie des jeunes (ONHJ, National youth orchestra), which inviting European composers to write a piece for performance.

Work

Capdenat expressed his goal as "music open to the acquisitions of contemporary language yet retaining the desire to be clear and lyrical and avoiding both demagogy and neo-romanticism". He composed music in genres from chamber music to opera, including aleatoric music, electroacoustics, repetitive music and serialism. After works which were then "avant-garde", he turned to more lyrical music. He composed Croce e delizia for Mady Mesplé, the opera Sébastien en martyr for the Tours Opera, his Requiem for the Festival d’art sacré at Dax, and Le condamné à mort and Une Carmen for the Opéra Éclaté.