Nicolas Vérin


Nicolas Vérin is a French composer and professor of music. His many influences, from jazz to electronics, from American to French music, give him an unusual style, apart from the main trends of French contemporary music, combining energy and subtleness.
While rooted in electroacoustic music and its approach based on composing with sounds rather than notes, he also wrote many instrumental pieces and specialized particularly in music mixing live performers and electronics, whether fixed sound or live processing. At the basis of his work are the musical gesture and the life of sound and its morphology. An improviser himself, his works often leave a creative space for performers, and he has collaborated on many occasions with famous improvisers.
Vérin received commissions from the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France, INA-GRM, Studios, Festivals and Conservatories. He was composer in residence in the Midi-Pyrénées region and was awarded the prize Villa Médicis hors les murs. His music, published by Éditions Jobert and Éditions François Dhalmann, has been performed and broadcast worldwide.

Life and work

Beginnings

Vérin was born 21 June 1958 in Saint-Omer, France. After initial studies with private professors of piano, at the Martenot School and the Brest Conservatory, he obtained his Diplôme de fin d’études from the Conservatoire National de Région de Saint-Maur in piano, studies in chamber music, harmony. At age 12 he started guitar and a year later founds and leads a pop music group. This was to be followed by jazz piano, which he learned mostly on his own, but also with teachers.
After his baccalauréat, he followed a summer workshop in Cordes, near Toulouse, by INA-GRM, during which he decided to become an electroacoustic composer. He then studied music and science at the Universities of Paris VI-Jussieu, Brest and Paris VIII-Vincennes, where he obtained a licence de musique. During this time, he organized with a fellow student the first electroacoustic music concert in the city of Brest. He later attended musical academies Acanthes, and Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
Thereafter, he entered the electroacoustic music composition class of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel at Paris Conservatory where he got his degree in 1979. Vérin went on to study 5 years at the University of California, San Diego, where he obtained a Master of Arts and a PhD in composition and computer music. His main professors there were Roger Reynolds, Jean-Charles François, Joji Yuasa, Robert Erickson, F. Richard Moore, Bernard Rands, Gordon Mumma, Julio Estrada.

Main career

Upon returning to France, Vérin collaborated as musical assistant with Pierre Henry, for studio work, recording original sounds, processing sounds, and concert performances in major Festivals in France and Germany. The pioneer of Musique Concrète invited him in his studio for a composition in 1988. Vérin is considered one of only two disciples of Pierre Henry. and has performed his music in many occasions.
In 1988, he was chosen by Jean-Claude Eloy to work at CIAMI in charge of the MIDI studio and the cmusic/CARL environment.
In 1989 he joined the creation department at IRCAM, where he works as a tutor. This involved coordinating the productions of invited composers and teaching several courses of Computer Music as well as participating in the beta-testing of Miller Puckette's Max programming language.
In 1990, Vérin founded the association Ligys, which becomes a studio coop with composers Christine Groult and Jacqueline Ozanne, active in Paris for productions and a few concerts. After the dissolution of Ligys, he founds in 2007 the association Impulsion.
In 1992 Vérin was appointed Professor of Electroacoustic music at the Conservatoire National de Région of Chalon sur Sâone, where he is tenured in 1998. From 2002 to the present, he is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at Ecole Nationale de Musique et de Danse d’Evry.
From 1992 to 1995, he is composer-in-residence in the Midi-Pyrénées Region. This includes a residence at LIMCA, where he realizes two compositions. He is appointed Musical Director for two editions of the Auch Danse/Musique Contemporaines Festival, involving the programming of 8 concerts, some in relation to dance companies. The residence also included studio work at GMEA, resulting in an electronic music piece, In Vino musica, given daily for the show Musique des Vignes from October through November 1992 at the Centre Culturel de l'Albigeois.
In 2003-2004, Vérin is invited at IRCAM to do a new version of his work 11 avenue du Midi on the WFS system, installation presented at Nicéphore Days in Chalon 2004, at IRCAM's Festival Résonance 2004 and in Leipzig in 2005.

As performer

Besides his compositional work, Vérin has also performed electronic music and improvisation. He founded Duo Alchemia with Julien Feltrin, touring in France. With the improvised music trio DSV he performed in France, in Russia and United States. Since the untimely death of Cécile Daroux, the group remains as a duo and renamed itself Ensemble Cécile. He performed with Vinko Globokar as electronic musician in the latter's magnum opus "Laboratorium", in concerts at UC San Diego, Witten, and Cologne.
Vérin appears also as improviser or electronic musician in several CDs and performed with saxophonist Daniel Kientzy, actor Jean-Louis Jacopin, flutist James Newton, saxophonist Steve Coleman, pianist Anne-Marie Fijal. He has performed the electronic part of mixed and acousmatic pieces by Pierre Henry and many others. As a pianist, Vérin was accompanist of choirs and singers, played in jazz groups.

Awards

Prizes

Vérin's catalog consists of more than 60 works, ranging from solo instrument to symphonic orchestra, through electronic music, stage music for theatre, dance. Several of his pieces are published by Éditions Jobert-Lemoine and Éditions François Dhalmann.

Main compositions