For more than twenty years, Philippe Leroux has opened ears worldwide with music that radiates energy, revealing the inner life of individual sonorities against a musical background that is always buoyant and in flux.   Already central to France's contemporary music scene, Leroux writes spontaneously playful, yet carefully constructed scores that are winning him ever greater recognition from ensembles in the United States, chief among them the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which has followed up on its 2003 and 2005 U. S. Premieres of the composer's M and VOI(REX) with tonight's performance of PPP and the world premiere of De la texture, commissioned with support from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.

Born in Boulogne, Leroux took up the piano and the guitar before entering the Paris Conservatoire to study composition with Ivo Malec and electro-acoustic music with Guy Reibel and Pierre Schaeffer; his other teachers have included Olivier Messaien, Franco Donatoni, Betsy Jolas, and Iannis Xenakis.   Leroux's thoughts on harmony and tone color have been linked to the experiments in "spectral music" carried out by Murail and Grisey, who sought to derive musical material from the internal structure of sounds.   His music also distinguishes itself through its attention to pulse, rhythm, and momentum.   According to Dominique Druhen, an expert on Leroux's work, the composer is preoccupied with "movement-its birth, its death, and the conservation of that energy which enables its continuation."

Pondering such abstract concerns suggests a certain philosophical-almost mystical-depth below the sparkling surface of his scores.   Indeed, the composer's commentary on the creative process often resembles prose poetry as much as musical analysis: "Sound actions (élans, races, downfalls, surges, pulsations...) ...are then set in motion by processes of transformation which are more or less continuous (compression/dilation, acceleration/deceleration, shifting of a pitch or timbre, dephrasing/rephrasing, accumulation/filtering, substitution, emerging/submerging, mimicry...) And whose limits (beginnings and ends of the processes, cadences, stages, changes of harmonic mode, mirror axes, diverse articulations...) define the different surroundings of the journey (from where one is leaving / to where one is going)."

Even without delving into the technical components of Leroux's style, one can appreciate the emphasis on motion in the titles of some of his best known works: the chamber piece Fleuve (River, 1988), the quintet Continuo(ns) (Continuo/Let's continue, 1994) and the Violin Concerto (d')ALLER ((on)GOING, 1995).   Underlying these evocative titles are myriad ways of creating and dispelling momentum.   In (d')ALLER, for example, rapid scales and arpeggios seem to shrink and expand as notes are added or removed, forming a shimmering backdrop for the contest between soloist and ensemble.   This concerto is the central panel in Leroux's triptych Continuo(ns)-(d')ALLER-Plus Loin (1999-2000), whose title collectively spell out what might be considered an artistic credo: "Let us go farther."

Much of Leroux's recent music involves the gradual transformation of sound sources.   Sometimes these transformations are concrete, as in the chamber work AAA (1996), which takes a quotation from baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's La Poule (The hen) as the springboard for a voluble chatter of variations.   Typically, however, Leroux's sound modulations are more abstract; for example, the 1998 trio De l'épaisseur (On density) explores the title concept by creating a "tangle of lines" that change over time, presenting different intensities of tone color, register, texture, and dynamics.   Even more strikingly, in M (1997, for two pianos, percussion, and electronics), the composer analyzed the attack and decay of selected piano sonorities to generate electronic sounds intimately related to their acoustic roots, creating a remarkable fluidity between electronic and non-electronic timbres.

Leroux's works have been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, IRCAM, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Festival Musica, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Norway's BIT 20, and the Belgian group Ictus.   His music has been heard around the world at the Tempo, Music Today, Agora, Roma-Europa, Nuove Synchronie, Bath and numerous other Festivals as well as in performance by New York's New Music Ensemble and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.   In 1994, he received SACEM's Hervé Dugardin prize, and two years later, he won their second prize for (d')ALLER.   He has since received SACEM's "prix de compositeurs," the André Caplet prize of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de l'Institut de France, the Paul and Mica Salabert prize for Apocalypsis, and the Arthur Honegger prize from the Fondation de France.   Leroux's Continuo(ns) was the subject of a book published by L'Harmattan, and the composer himself has written many articles on contemporary music.   From 1993-95, he was Resident at the Académie de France in Rome, and from 2001-06, he taught composition and computer music at IRCAM.   In 2005-06, he was also Professor of Composition at McGill University in Montreal as part of the Fondation Langlois, and from 2007-09 he is Composer in Residence at the Arsenal de Metz and with the Orchestre National de Lorraine. Actually he is professor of composition at Université de Montréal   (Québec).