Fabien Lévy was born in December 1968 in Paris. Along with the study of piano (classic and jazz) and organ, he studied musical analysis (1st Prize), orchestration (1st prize), musicology, harmony, electroacoustic and instrumental composition. Also a graduate in mathematics and economics, he first worked in parallel as a researcher and lecturer in both fields, before he decided to work full-time in music in 1994. Between 1996 and 2001, whilst attending the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris, he studied composition with Gérard Grisey, analysis with Mïchael Levinas, ethnomusicology with Gilles Leothaud and orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie.

Along with his compositional activities, he received a Ph.D. on the complexity of musical processes at EHESS and CNRS and has written numerous theoretical articles. He worked at IRCAM, first in 1998 as artistic director of the Studio Online Project, and then as pedagogical advisor for the organisation of colloquium and cultural events (1999-2000). He also lectured at the musicology dept. at the Sorbonne-University (Paris), and taught 2004-2006 orchestration for the composition students at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns-Eisler in Berlin (Germany). He is currently assistant-professor in Composition at the Columbia University in New-York (USA).

As a composer, he is laureate of the Singer-Polignac Foundation (1995) and the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogram (residency of one year in 2001 in Berlin). Its orchestral work Hérédo-Ribotes was nominated at the international Rostrum of composers (2002). He received the french Rom prize (residency in 2002 in the Villa Medicis / French academy in Rome). He won in 2004 the Förderpreis of the foundation Ernst von Siemens for the music.

His works for soloists, chamber music, ensemble, orchestra (used as a big ensemble of soloists) or computer, have been performed across Europe and the United States, by ensembles and soloists including C. Delangle, the Composer's ensemble, the NEIC, Itinéraire, TM+, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, the Habanera Quartet, the Arte Quartet, the National Orchestra of Toulouse, the Berlin Radio Symphony orchestra, ... The works currently focuse on the relation between the whole and the detail, paradoxes of the perception and the musical grammatology, and techniques of cross-rhythms generalized to every musical parameter. The instrumental works are all published by Billaudot.

L'air d'ailleurs - bicinium (1997)
for alto saxophone, tape and electronics

Durch, in memoriam Gérard Grisey (1998)
pour quatuor de saxophones

n the scored contrapuntal music of the West, the combination of different voices often parallels the notation of the score. A classical string quartet, for example, is generally notated in four voices, each of which is bound to an instrument of the quartet. Music that is handed down orally, on the other hand, often features a higher level of contrapuntal organisation, made necessary by the absence of written parts. The different voices are distributed among the different players with considerably more subtlety.

The instrumentation of the saxophone quartet is unusual in classical music. The four instruments are, in comparison to the string quartet, relatively homogeneous, with each instrument representing a broad palette of colours and different playing styles. This combination features four instruments which, paradoxically, resemble each other so closely that each can stand in for a multiplicity of different instruments.

When the Habanera Quartet commissioned me to write this piece, I realised that this peculiarity provided a solution to the issue which was of greatest musical interest to me at the time, namely the relationship of the whole to the individual parts. in Durch, the music is almost never the sum of its parts. Depending on how sharply ones hearing is focused, everything develops from one fugure and is a unified whole, in constant development. This figure becomes a mosaic, consisting of small, simple elements, ordered in a regular fashion. With the sharpest possible focus, each of these elements gains its own voice, as if via a line laid in perspective through the sound space and a dense counterpoint of colours and rhythms. This alternation between the binding together and the individuation of elements makes for constant progress, emanating from light and striving for breath - as indicated by both the meaning ('through') and the sound of the (German) title of the piece.

This work is dedicated to the memory of Gérard Grisey, who was my tutor in composition and taught us 'musical ethics' for four years at the Paris Conservatoire, and who suddenly died in November 1998, while I was composing this piece.