Gérard Grisey
French composer. He began to study music at the Conservatory in Trossingen, Germany (1963 – 1965) and continued at the Paris Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Olivier Messiaen's class (1968 – 1972). In parallel he also attended lessons by Henry Durilleux at the Ecole Normal de Musique. Grisey attended summer compositional courses at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and the Darmstadt courses (1972), where there were lectures by the renowned composers György Ligeti, Karlheinz Srockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He also attended lectures in acoustics at the Faculte des Sciences de Paris. In 1972 Grisey acquired the Rome Prize and had a stipendiary residency at the Ville de Medici in Rome (1972 – 1974). Together with Tristan Murail, Roger Tessier and Michael Levinas he was a founding member of the Ensemble itineraire. In the 1980s, as well as composing, he worked in the IRCAM studios, won the DAAD stipend for a residency in Berlin, and later became professor of musical theory and composition at California's Berkeley School of Music. After returning to Europe he taught composition at the Paris Conservatory and led compositional seminars in France (Centre Acanthes, Avignon, Lyons, Paris) and abroad (Darmstadt, Freiburg, Milan, Reggio Emilia, Oslo, Helsinki, Malmo, Goteborg, Los Angeles, Stanford, London, Moscow, Madrid).