This week, mayor Anne Hidalgo unveiled the restored Stravinsky fountain by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. For the occasion, I was commissioned by IRCAM and the Pompidou Center to create a work inspired by the fountain’s sculptures. I joined forces with poet Laura Vazquez to create l’eau, la colonne, le fer. You can listen to it at the location of the fountain, or online here, or this spring at the Pompidou Center.

Work on the new opera continues! This time at the Camargo Foundation, where Ganavya and I are spending one month developing the libretto. It’s truly a gift to be back in this studio by the sea, where I composed the first scenes of Like Flesh back in 2021. A big thank you to Julie Chenot and the Villa Albertine for making this possible. If you’re in the Marseille area, come join us for a public presentation on October 25th!

Nine Jeweled Deer, my new opera-in-development with Ganavya Doraiswamy and Peter Sellars, has just been selected for an incubator fellowship at the Royaumont Foundation. We are thrilled about this opportunity to reunite in Royaumont next Spring for a week of intense musical work with the ensemble. More info coming soon!

My week as guest composer at the 2023 IlSuono Contemporary Music Week just came to an end. A beautifully rewarding experience mentoring 14 composers from around the world, and hearing their world premiers played with care, precision, and sensitivity by Ensemble Suono Giallo.

The SACD (society of authors and composers in the performing arts) has announced their prize winners for 2023 in the categories of cinema, television, radio, theater, choreography, and music. I am honoured to be the recipient of the New Talent Prize in music, and to stand alongside Joël Pommerat, Cédric Klapisch, and Sonia Wieder-Atherton among other wonderful artists. Official announcement here.

Last week, Peter, Ganavya and I united in Rome with three collaborators: Mrudangam artist Rajna Swaminathan, cellist Severine Ballon, and computer music designer Augustin Muller. We worked through sketches of musical scenes and and explored form and text through improvisation. The week-long workshop culminated in an open-session performance, which was the first musical taste of the new opera that we are developing, Nine Jeweled Deer. Next step: a residency at the Camargo foundation to finalize the libretto. A huge thank you to the Villa Medici, Villa Albertine, Camargo Foundation, and IRCAM for making this workshop possible!

Next month, the group exhibition Una Linea Storta Tesa will open at the Villa Medici, and a book has been commissioned to accompany it. It contains a very special article by writer and philosopher Simon(e) Van Saarloos: A fictional love letter that traces my music through our friendship over the past seven years. A PDF version will be available later this summer, but until then, I invite you to read it if you have a chance to visit the exhibit in person.

This fall I was commissioned by IRCAM to create a new work for the re-inauguration of the iconic Stravinsky Fountain. I invited poet Laura Vazquez to write a new text for the occasion, and last week we met at IRCAM to record it. Thanks to RIM Etienne Demoulin and sound engineer Sylvain Cadars we were greeted by an ASMR-worthy mic setup complete with a binaural head, and it was great fun. The work will stream online from June 7th, as part of the 2023 ManiFeste Festival, and will travel to the Pompidou Center as a sound installation in Spring 2024.

Anterior Study for Electric Strings was premiered at Eclat Festival last month by guitarist Nadav Lev, and the live radio broadcast is coming up later this month. Meanwhile, also in the German-speaking world, Marie-Therese Rudolph featured Solicitations and Heave in her radio program on ORF Radio Wien, alongside Haas’ String quartet #11. You can listen here.

2023 opens with the revival of Archive[s], a duo for violin and cello with video projection that I wrote back in 2010. On Wednesday it will be performed by Schallfeld ensemble in Vienna, and in March by MUSIQA Collective in Houston. Full details on the events page.

My string quartet Solicitations, which premiered in 2018, has been touring Europe and the US this Fall. Diotima Quartet brought it to Wien Modern Festival alongside works by Neuwirth, Furrer, and Haas (more in this review from DiePress). While Mivos Quartet gave its US premiere in NY, then toured it in California, Pennsylvania, and Paris. More info in the events page.

My new trio Dreams amongst hers premiered last week in Aix-en-Provence by the exquisite Marie-Laure Garnier, Shuichi Okada, and Emmanuel Jacquet. Through invented phonemes and consonants, it was an exercise in sound imbued with meaning. Diapason Magazine described it as an “Intensely poetic dialogue… a play on dreams”.

Like Flesh travelled to Musica Festival this month, with three performances at Lorraine National Opera. Crescendo Magazine described it as an “original, strange, beautiful and timely operatic experience” that “takes us on a sensory, musical, sonic and visual adventure.” The local Est Republicain described it as a work of “total immersion… great beauty… which leads us to a trance” while La Fleure du Dimanche described it as “Poetic and political with mesmerising music” “posing intimate questions about love, fidelity, and normativity with delicacy and tenderness” and “modern yet completely accessible, and above all sensitive and moving. A great success!”. See HERE for more reviews, videos and photos.

My year amongst Indian peacocks, Egyptian obelisks, and Ovidian marbles has officially begun. It will be dotted with concerts and talks, beginning with the White Night event on November 17th, and leading up to the annual expo on June 9th. More updates to come.

David Daurier of Camera Lucida Productions, together with B Media, have created a stunning film version of the opera Like Flesh, which premiered online this past weekend. You can stream it on Medici.tv until July 2027 (paid subscription) or on Opera Vision for free until January 2023.

Just back from LA, where a new collaboration is being born with Peter Sellars and Ganavya Doraiswamy. It’s the very beginning still, and a new musical direction, so more about that in the Fall. But meanwhile, a very big thank you to the Villa Albertine - the new residency program of the French Cultural Services in the US - for making the trip possible.

This Fall I will begin a one-year residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. More about that there.

My residency at MacDowell got rescheduled twice due to COVID, which meant that instead of working here franticly on Like Flesh, I get to take long walks in the company of trees, read plays by Annie Baker at the library, and go swimming with new friends. A breath of new inspiration after the opera premiere.

While the Words and Music workshop that I led with writer/director Ted Huffman came to an end last July, the operatic scenes that were created as part of it are premiering today in a beautifully filmed version by Opéra de Montpellier. I invite you to watch the six new works by composers Alex Ho, Diana Syrse, Dan Chappell , Kirsten Milenko, Ole Hübner and Juta Pranulyté and their collaborators HERE.