Fabien Lévy
Fabien Lévy (born 11 December 1968) is a French composer. Biography. Lévy was born in Paris, France. After having been a jazz pianist, he studied composition with Gérard Grisey, orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie and ethnomusicology with Gilles Leothaud at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1996 to 2000. Trained in mathematics and mathematical economics (Master from ENSAE and ENS Ulm Delta, adjunct in mathematics from 1989 to 1992 and researcher from 1992 to 1994), he definitively quit science for music in 1994. In 2001, he went to Berlin on the DAAD Artist program, and in 2002 to the  Villa Medici / Academy of France in Rome. In 2004 he shared the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in composition with Johannes Maria Staud and Enno Poppe. A former pedagogical advisor at IRCAM in Paris and professor of orchestration at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory in Berlin, he was 2006-2012 assistant professor in composition at Columbia University in New York, was 2012-2017 senior professor for composition at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold in Germany, and is since oct. 2017 senior professor for composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater 'Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy' Leipzig. He has held numerous composition  seminars and lectures in Europe (including Berlin, Como, Royaumont, Darmstadt, Tchaikovsky city, and Paris) and the US (including at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern University, Manhattan School of Music, and Cornell University). His instrumental works, influenced by the spectral school, some acoustic illusions and techniques from various non-Western cultures, mainly focus on paradoxes of perception and musical grammatology, and on techniques of "cross-rhythms" generalized to every musical parameter and "instrumental pointillism", and on deconstructing major concepts of the Western music. While using new technologies, he has also developed some "meta-works" (such as "Soliloque sur [x, x...]"). Fabien