Joël-François Durand

Composing, writing, teaching, inventing new ways of hearing – all are linked in the work of Joël-François Durand. As a composer, his career was launched in Europe with important prizes: a Third Prize at in the 1983 Stockhausen Competition for the piano piece “…d’asiles déchirés…,” the Kranichsteiner Preis from the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in 1990. Commissions and performances from many of today’s most significant ensembles followed – Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Jack Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Quatuor Diotima, ASKO, Ensemble Recherche, musikFabrik, Talea Ensemble, Dal Niente Ensemble, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Seattle Symphony Orchestra. As a guest composer and lecturer, Durand has contributed to the “Centre de la Voix” in Royaumont, France where he was co-director of the composition course in September 1993, the “Civica Scuola di Musica” in Milan, Italy (1995), the Royal Academy for Music in London, UK (1997), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (1984, 1990, 1992, 1994), the “VIII. Internationaler Meisterkurs für Komposition des Brandenburgischen Colloquiums für Neue Musik”, Rheinsberg (1998), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (2004), and Stanford University (2006), among others. In the Fall 1994 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of California at San Diego.

Durand is Professor of Composition and Director of the School of Music, University of Washington. He was awarded the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship in 2003-06 and 2019-22. He is currently the Aura B. Morrison Endowed Professor.

Durand’s works are singular and powerful, combining rigorous and innovative structures with a prominent lyrical impulse. Since 2019, he has done extensive research in the phenomenon of first-order beats, and sought to use it a the basis of his musical language.

Durand’s music and personality received critical attention in the 2005 book Joël-François Durand in the Mirror Land (University of Washington Press and Perspectives of New Music) edited by his University of Washington School of Music colleague Jonathan Bernard, which features in addition to analyses by Bernard and several of the School’s students, as well as three theoretical texts by Durand, including an innovative self-interview authored by Durand himself.

Recent projects for Durand include a work for large orchestra commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and premiered in 2019, a work for viola and ensemble, Geister, schwebende Geister (2020) and his 3rd string quartet (2023-24).

Commercial recordings of his music are available on the Auvidis-Naïve, Mode Records, Wergo, Albany Records and Soundset Recordings labels.
A double CD of his music was released in 2024 on the Kairos label (https://www.kairos-music.com/cds/0022200kai)

In 2009, Durand embarked on a new path: he designed and started commercial production of a new tonearm for record players. The Talea, as it was called, took the audio world by storm and was soon followed by three further models, the Telos, the Kairos and the most recent, the Tosca all aimed at the most refined audio reproduction systems. For his work at his company Durand Tonearms LLC, he was made a University of Washington Entrepreneurial Fellow in 2010.

Durand is listed in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.