Philippe Malhaire

Philippe Malhaire (1983-) holds an Agrégation in Music and a Doctorate in Music and Musicology from the University of Paris IV Sorbonne. He is currently director of the collection Musics in question(s) published by L'Harmattan, co-editor-in-chief of the musical journal Pour les sonorités opposées – aesthetics and musical analysis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and teaches at the University of Lorraine (Metz). Specialized in modernity and postmodernity, he is a recognized theorist of polytonality, being the author of numerous works about this subject.
Philippe Malhaire’s works do show an extremely sensitive musical personality led by a great firmness of mind and moved by a deep ideal. He is one of these composers who are aware today of the necessity of reintegrating into a modern discourse contrapuntal and harmonious wealth inherited from the tradition. Novelty at all costs is for him an overtaken concept: « A work is not "new" because it systematically reinvents musical language, or because it challenges the perceptual capabilities of the human brain. A work is really "new" when its author conceives the work with honesty and great care, enabling its unique personality, that is the result of his time, his education and his aesthetic choices, to express itself musically in order to bring to life an emotion that, inevitably, did not exist in that particular form. That is the true "novelty": in this form, it is eternal » (Pour les sonorités opposées, n°1, 2017, p.100).