Gérard Pape

Gérard Pape (born April 22, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York) is a composer of electronic music, author, and Lacanian psychologist. He is a former student of David Winkler, George Cacioppo, William Albright, and George Balch Wilson. He became the director of Les Ateliers UPIC (now CCMIX) in 1991 and in 2015 authored a French-English bi-lingual book Musipoesc: Writings About Music that was published by Éditions Michel de Maule. Pape has lived and worked in France since the early 1990s. Gérard Pape studied clinical psychology and music simultaneously at the University of Michigan, and is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst as well as a composer. After moving to France at the beginning of the 1990s, his compositions came under the influence of the Mexican composer Julio Estrada. Estrada shares with Pape an interest in psychoanalysis and focuses on what he calls "sound fantasies"—fantasies that occur "inside the head of the composer and take the form of sequences of sounds". Pape extended Estrada's conception by treating chaos as a formal concept. For example, in his opera-in-progress, Weaveworld, Pape "employs sudden and unpredictable patterns in streams of sound in a plasma that draws from chaos models". The tape part for Makbénach I and III convolves "timbre paths", made from chains of sampled saxophone sounds, together with a dense series of grains following particular trajectories (produced by a computer program called Cloud Generator), in order to produce timbral transformations. Pape's 1995 chamber opera Monologue uses as text the Samuel Beckett play A Piece of Monologue. His most important work is Feu toujours vivant for large orchestra and 4 sampler keyboards (1997), which was commissioned by Art Zoyd and the Orchestre national de Lille, conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus. In 2007, Gerard Pape created the CLSI ensemble (Circle for the Liberation of Sounds & Images) with various musicians and composers such as Olga Krashenko, Paul Méfano, Jacqueline Méfano, Lissa Meridan, Michael Kinney, Martin Phelps, Rodolphe Bourotte, Stefan Tiedje, and Jean-Baptiste Favory.