Suzanne Giraud

Suzanne Giraud (born 31 July 1958) is a French music educator and composer of contemporary music.

Her works are marked by a predilection for percussion, voices and Strings; they resonate with her artistic, poetic and architectural inspirations.

Born in Metz, Suzanne Giraud grew up in Strasbourg, in an artistic environment with strong musical and literary influences.

Her awakening to music was sparked by the works of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven or Chopin, with a strong preference for Mozart very early on.

At the age of 8, she entered the conservatory of Strasbourg; she studied music theory, piano, violin, viola, musical writing, accompaniment, chamber music, as well as the orchestra as a violist, then as an apprentice chef; she discovered the school of Vienna, Messiaen and his successors, the first door to modernity.

After a university degree in linguistics, she entered the CNSMDP in 1977; she followed the lessons of analysis, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and composition, as well as that of orchestra conducting ; she graduated in these disciplines.

Suzanne Giraud diversified her musical education with Claude Ballif, Jacques Lejeune and Philippe Mion at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Hugues Dufourt, Tristan Murail at l'Itinéraire, Iannis Xenakis.

Noticed by Franco Donatoni, Suzanne Giraud entered the Accademia Chigiana in Siena; there she perfected her skills in composition, as well as in conducting with Franco Ferrara.

In 1984, she was appointed for two years at the Villa Medici; in Rome, she met Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she remained close, and participated in the activities of the Scelsi Foundation.

She also attended summer school in Darmstadt where she met Morton Feldman, Horatiu Radulescu, Brian Ferneyhough.

Suzanne Giraud received important orders from the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Radio France, the French State, Musique Nouvelle en Liberté, Festival Musica de Strasbourg, Dresden Festival, Festival Ars Musica de Bruxelles, Proquartet, Festival Presences Féminin, The Arditti Quartet, the Manfred Quartet, Festival de Perpignan, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Orchestre National de France, Opéra-théâtre de Metz-Métropole, The Danish Chamber Players, the NYME New York Metropolitan Ensemble, etc.

She is invited to the Almeida Theatre in London, the Hague Residence Orchestra, the Köln Akademie der Künstler, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, Geneva, Lausanne, Darmstadt, Cardiff, Siena, Saarbrücken, Dresden and Salzburg, as well as in many festivals and seasons in France and Europe, Fribourg International Festival, Festival de la Villa Medicis, Perpignan Aujourd’hui musiques, Festival Musicalta Pfaffenheim, Festival Musica de Strasbourg, Festival Les Musiques de Marseille, etc.

She collaborates with prestigious ensembles and performers: the Arditti Quartet, the Diotima Quartet, the Manfred Quartet, the Trio Sora, the Trio à cordes de Paris, the Orchestre de Chambre National de Toulouse, the Orchestre d'Auvergne, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie, Ensemble Accroche-Note, Ensemble de l'Itinéraire, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble 2E2M, Les Siècles, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Kent Nagano, Philippe Jaroussky, François-Xavier Roth, Stéphane Tran Ngoc, Anne Gastinel, Thierry Miroglio, Joëlle Léandre, Jean-Philippe Collard, Graziella Contratto, Sandrine Sutter, Jean-Paul Bonnevalle, etc.

She likes to multiply experiences and compose for diverse ensembles: solo instruments, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, instrumental ensembles or mixing instruments and voices, vocal ensembles, percussion, orchestra, opera, etc.

She also composes for children.

For two years, from 1991 to 1993, she produced a program on France Musique, Les mots et les notes, in collaboration with Jean-Yves Bosseur, a program dedicated to Renaissance musical Europe, among others.

Among her commissions, we find several educational works in her catalog: Le Singe, la Banquise et le Téléphone portable (The Monkey, the Ice Floe and the Mobile Phone) in 2005, Fables the same year and, in 2019, Perpetuum Mobile for the orchestras of DEMOS Île-de-France.

The Fondazione Isabella Scelsi invited her to Rome in November 2005 for a program of her music and to talk about Giacinto Scelsi, (tribute broadcast live by the RAI).

In 2007/2008, Suzanne Giraud was composer in residence at the Conservatoire supérieur de Genève, then with the Orchestre d'Auvergne and its conductor Arie van Beek.

Suzanne Giraud gave her first lessons at the age of 16, in a local cultural youth centre in a Strasbourg district considered «disadvantaged»; for two years, she introduced children to the piano and music.

She quickly joined the Conservatory of Strasbourg and taught piano, before going to Île-de-France to teach writing, music history, preparation for the baccalaureate test, analysis.

In Paris, at the CNSMDP, Alain Louvier entrusted her with a multidisciplinary short cycle writing class.

She teaches, in particular, the counterpoint of the Renaissance.

She then became director of the conservatory of the 20th arrondissement of Paris where she led the project of classes with adapted theater schedules for schoolchildren and created an electroacoustic creation studio and a computer-assisted synthesis and composition studio.

She returned to pedagogy and joined the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris as a professor of composition and contemporary musical culture.

From 2011, she runs a Contemporary Workshop open to everybody, which allows CRR students to understand contemporary music, to develop listening and exchange with living composers, meetings are also open to interested audiences.

Among the sources of inspiration of Suzanne Giraud, literature, architecture, the Renaissance.

Marguerite de Navarre, Titian, Caravaggio, Miguel de Cervantes, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Joachim du Bellay, Michel Leiris, Pascal Quignard, J.R.R.Tolkien, Petrarch, Edgar Allan Poe, are some of her references.

Her catalogue reflects this: L’Offrande à Vénus, inspired by a painting by Titian; Jaffa, on a painting by Antoine-Jean Gros; To one in Paradise, on a poem by Edgar Poe; Qu’as-tu vu dans le vaste monde ? from Mellin de Saint-Gelais; Petrarca, collection of madrigals on Petrarch sonnets; La musique nous vient d’ailleurs, from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.

She has worked with contemporary authors; on five occasions, with Pascal Quignard, including Johannisbaum in 2011, Le chant du Marais in 2017, Les enfants du Marais in 2019; with Dominique Fernandez for the opera Caravaggio of which she has co-wrote the libretto and where Philippe Jaroussky played the title role; with Olivier Py, for the creation of the opera Le Vase de Parfums.

Practicing poetry herself, she sets her own verses to music (Bleu et ombre, Liesse)

Passionate about classical and contemporary literature, arts and architecture, trained in linguistics and a wide variety of musical writing techniques, from the polyphony of the Renaissance to spectral music, Suzanne Giraud draws from this soil the material of a dense and demanding music.

Each composition is created ex nihilo, without any repetition of what was imagined before.

Suzanne Giraud says she needs this novelty, a driving force for dynamism and an antidote to boredom.

Her inspiration is mainly literary

The orchestra is an area that she knows well, as she was part of various ensembles as a violist from a very early age.

She learned balance with the other orchestra sections, the Strings of course, and also winds, woodwinds, brass, percussion, as well as understanding the work of the conductor.

She also has a predilection for voice.

She deciphered the piano parts at the same time as the voice parts, encouraged to sing herself by her deciphering teacher.

With one of her sisters, she performed most of the Lieder of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Johannes Brahms, helped by her practice of German.