Australian classical composer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Clift (born 21 March 1978) is an Australian composer of contemporary classical music. His catalogue of works to date comprises mostly instrumental music, often with electronics, video or other multimedia elements.
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Born in Melbourne, Australia, Paul Clift began his musical education with studies of piano.[1] Upon graduating with a degree in music composition and linguistics from Monash University, he moved to Paris for further study of composition.[1] In 2006, he earned a master's degree from King's College London. The following year, he returned to Paris where he undertook the IRCAM Cursus de composition et d'informatique musicale.[2] In 2009, he moved to New York for doctoral studies at Columbia University.[3] His doctoral thesis deals with musical temporality and its relationship with memory and perception.[4] While working on his doctorate, he undertook residencies at the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel), to research alternative temporal/spatial notation systems and novel forms of musical tablature, and at IRCAM, where he collaborated with René Caussé on the development of "Acoustic Aggregate Synthesis",[5] a "real-time performance tool which fuses synthetic and acoustic sound sources to yield a semi-acoustic resynthesis of a pre-defined acoustic model."[6] His publications in the latter field have been widely cited in research on hybrid musical instruments.
Among the composition professors which Paul Clift acknowledges as significant influences on his creative outlook are Franck Bedrossian, Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, Fabien Lévy, Philippe Leroux and George Benjamin.[1]
In 2016, he moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he currently resides.[7] From 2016 to 2022, he served as artistic director of neuverBand,[1] a chamber ensemble dedicated to contemporary music. In 2019, his large-scale scenic work "Portal Fantasies" was premiered at the Zeiträume Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur in Basel.[8] From January 2023 until August 2024, he was the artistic director of Freiburg-based Ensemble Recherche.[9] Also in 2023, he became president of the Basel chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, IGNM).
Paul Clift's works have been performed at contemporary music festivals including World Music Days, Agora, Festival Ensemble(s), Weimarer Frühjahrstage für zeitgenössische Musik, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ReMusik, MATA, Rainy Days Luxembourg, Musikfestival Bern, SMC Lausanne and Ultima Oslo.
His scores are published by BabelScores,[10] Schweizer Musikedition[11] and the Australian Music Centre.[7]
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