Yann Robin

French composer born in 1974. After studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris he took the music and computers course at ircam in order to consolidate his knowledge of new technologies applied to sound. After this period of training he was given a residency at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici). 

Yann Robin is frequently seen as belonging to the “saturation” tendency that emerged in France in the mid-2000s. His attraction to dense, virtuosic, powerful and physical music, which can sometimes take the form of a paroxysmal quest, tends to put the emphasis on the deeper aural registers. Robin’s frequent collaborations with soloists facilitate an immediate back and forth between (instrumental) gesture and timbre, so that with each new piece he continues to push the limits of instrumental and sound techniques, and with them the limits of the imaginary.

He works with and has received commissions from many prestigious ensembles and orchestras, notably the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Klangforum in Vienna, the Ensemble Moderne and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Seattle Symphony, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg. Among the conductors he has worked with are Susanna Mälkki, Alan Gilbert, François-Xavier Roth, Peter Rundel, and Ludovic Morlot. 

In addition to his work as a composer, he has been artistic director of the Ensemble Multilatérale for ten years now. His music is published by Editions Jobert.

Triades

Triades is the third and last piece in a cycle around the double bass begun in 2013 with Nicolas Crosse, double bassist and soloist at the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which will be produced in close collaboration with the filmmaker, photographer, artist and writer Alain Fleischer. The first two pieces are Symétriades (2013, 14’) for double bass and electronics, and Asymétriades (2014, 20’) for double bass and ensemble. The poetic world of these first two pieces in the cycle is directly derived from the Stanislas Lem science fiction novel Solaris.

Triades, the last piece in this cycle, features the double bass, an ensemble of some twenty musicians, a real-time electronic apparatus and mapping done within the Philharmonie de Paris–Cité de la Musique. The work is slated to première in June 2018 at the Philharmonie de Paris—Cité de la Musique in partnership with the Ensemble intercontemporain, Le Fresnoy and ircam. In 2017, a first mapping will be done by Alain Fleischer, based on the first piece in the cycle, Symétriades. This will concern the body of the soloist and their instrument and aim to allow an ideal interaction between the different elements involved (audio/visual technological tools) and the soloist. The playing, or rather the instrumental gesture initiated by Nicolas Crosse, is what will drive the different transformations of the sound in real time and their correlation with the deformations or distortions of the image. In Triades this “image” or mapping will be deployed beyond the soloist’s body and instrument. The visual result will spread over the circular surfaces of the Cité de la Musique, but will be only one of the many different parts of this creature, of this organic structure whose living centre will be the double bass. The main ambition of this project is to create an overall object in which the interdependence of the soloist, the ensemble, the electronic apparatus and the mapping will be total.