Sebastien Gaxie

Sébastien Gaxie has played with key figures of the French jazz, such as H. Texier, C. Barthélemy and D. Levallet. He set up and ran an ensemble of 18 musicians, the Zhig Band, for two years. Sébastien Gaxie was admitted in the famous selective composition class of the National Academy of Music in Paris in February 2000. For his dissertation on Olivier Messiaen's Exotic Birds he got a first prize of musical analysis with the highest distinction and the unanimous vote of the jury of the French National Academy of music in June in 2001. He has obtained his degree in composition in October 2005. From 2007 until today he works at Ircam discovering the bridges between art, science and technology. He has written about thirty instrumental or orchestral pieces until now. His music has been played in several countries like France, Japan, England, Israel, Thailand amongst others. He has worked with various classic, contemporary and jazz musicians and musical groups such as the NEM from Montreal, Court-Circuit, 2E2M Claude Delangle, Guillaume Bourgogne, Alain Louvier, Pascal Rophé, the quartet Onyx, Médéric Collignon. He has also written film music for various short, medium length and feature films and thus cooperated with the London Symphony Orchestra, Alexandre Desplat, Brigitte Fontaine, Natacha Samuel, Romuald Beugnon, Hélène Abram and recently Karl Lagerfeld. 

French composer Sébastien Gaxie explores the relations between dance and movement. Together with Emio Greco | PC he works on a “grammar” of the relation between dance and movement which focuses mainly on moments of synchronicity between the two. His project is part of the research that takes place within ICKam- sterdam into “dansicality”. Here he presents his translation of several dance sequences into music.

“The contact with Emio and Pieter stems from the latest work I created in the Louvre for the Agora festival, organized by IRCAM last June. I com- posed electronic music to accompany a silent movie by Alexander Medvedkine entitled The Happiness. I made a composition that follows the movements of each character during the entire movie. Thus, all the sounds are visible on screen (and vice versa). This process becomes complex when there are several characters acting at the same time.

It occurred to me that it should be possible to work with dance in the same way, and I thought of building, with Emio and Pieter, a kind of grammar between their dance and my music which follows this same idea of synchronicity. The music acts as a magnifying glass for the precision of the move- ments and phrases of the dancers. The idea of this project is to imagine several ways to make one-on- ones between dance and music but without losing the overall time structure. The goal is to have, like Emio so beautifully put is, “miracle moments” in which music and dance fit perfectly together, while at the same time music and dance keep their own individual strengths.

If I think about why I wanted to works with dance: in the desire to get acquainted with other media, one can try to find an extension of your own. I am aware that I will never be a choreographer, but working with choreographers gives me the possibility to think like a choreographer. It gives me new ideas and expands my artistic possibilities.”