BIOGRAPHY
Jean-Philippe Calvin studied composition with Iannis Xenakis, James Sellars and Ingram Marshall, electronic music with Gerard Pape, Luc Ferrari and Curtis Roads, and conducting with Bernard Haitink and Harold Farberman. He also attended Master Classes given by Sir Michael Tippett, Gunther Schuller and John Williams.
The author of numerous works, he has received commissions for his music from several major international institutions, and music festivals and his compositions have been performed by leading performers and ensembles worldwide.
Calvin’s first opera, La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) was commissioned by and developed through the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Encouraged by the American writer Susan Sontag in the mid-1990s, Calvin has adapted Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play to a comic opera. La Cantatrice Chauve premiered at the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet in Paris in 2009 was critically acclaimed and received the Orphée d’Or (Golden Orpheus) award in May 2010.
The domain of symphonic music is enriched by Calvin’s Klezmer Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, Kadosh (2009). Kadosh was commissioned and premiered by the New-York clarinettist David Krakauer at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris with l’Orchestre Lamoureux. In 2013, he completed and premiered his Danses Concertantes commissioned by l’Orchestre d’Harmonie de Levallois.
He was, until 2014, the Professor and Research Associate in contemporary music as well as the director and the founder of the Variable Geometry Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Royal College of Music. He then became the Clive Marks research associate in Holocaust & Jewish Music studies at World ORT, focusing on: Music, Memory & The Holocaust - The Forgotten Music and the Songs of Sephardic Jews in Post-Ottoman Turkey.
In January 2016, he was awarded by the Leverhulme Trust to become the first composer in residence at the Science Museum London, to compose the soundtrack for the documentary film The Museums of the New Age. The film was premiered with a live ensemble under the composer’s direction at the Science Museum London and then at the Manchester Science Festival 2016.
With over fifteen years of experience in musical, artistic direction, production and programming, Jean-Philippe Calvin not only promoted contemporary music culture but also encouraged contributions to the development of reciprocal relationships, cross-disciplinary innovations, and mutual exchanges between music, media, contemporary arts and science.
His compositional style is characterized by energetic, virtuosic and spatial orchestral writing and quick changes of atmosphere, as well as by skilful manipulation of timbre, an acute sense of dramaturgy and a close familiarity with live-electronics. His works are marked by a concern with the role of gesture, sound and acoustics.