Martin Loridan

Martin Loridan is an internationally established composer and Professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels. His works are regularly performed in Europe and beyond by internationally renowned performers such as Claude Delangle, Rohan de Saram, the Arditti Quartet, the ensembles Klangforum Wien, Fractales, Mise-en, and Accroche note. He has been awarded prestigious international prizes, such as the Reinl Foundation Prize (Vienna), the André Jolivet Prize (Paris), and the Vareler Prize (Berlin).

He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM). He also holds a PhD in composition from the University of Leeds (UK) that has been funded by prestigious academic grants, including the Stanley Burton Research Scholarship and the Leeds Doctoral Scholarship. His doctoral research is an investigation into air and breath (souffle) as a composition material.

Throughout his career, he has developed a growing interest in traditional music (Villa Salammbô residence with the support of the French Institute in Tunis), as well as the development of new instrumental hybridizations. This includes, for example, an extended pedal system that expands the possibilities of intra-piano playing and resonance, new amplified uses of instruments (such as the accordion) that exploit electronics as a fragile element, work on hybrid lutheries, such as those derived from the Naylute, a crossbreed between the Western flute and the traditional Arab Nay. In these different contexts, he could develop the main axes of his research: the tactility of air and breath (souffle) and its dual human and instrumental resonance, as well as the porosity of air as a timbral material and its development within orchestral forces and electronic expansions in amplified works.

He is also the recipient of the prestigious Art Research Fund (Fonds de la Recherche en Arts FRArt) awarded by the National Funds for Scientific Research, Belgium (FNRS). He is the artistic director of the Festival Mosaïques, an interdisciplinary experimental music festival gathering international artists as well as an intergenerational public each year in Brussels. His scores are published by BabelScores, Paris.