Description
Fabien Levy creates a music between clarity and mystery, persistence and fragility, existential seriousness and playful pleasure. His compositional work is informed by intensive research into aesthetic perception and musical practice from a global perspective. Levy is an advocate of a 'cognitive music' that aims to comprehensively activate perception, a music that can be listened to. This is why he is so fond of conceptual and sonic ambivalences, complex textures and perceptual paradoxes. In this sense, he has been practising an "art of misleading" since his early days as a composer, a turn of phrase that he later made the title of one of his works. In the best tradition of his mentors Gerard Grisey and Jean-Claude Risset, Levy adheres to an emphatic conception of art that understands every composition as a risk-taking venture, an incursion into unknown territory, and opposes blindly following the simplest artistic path.
The first of his two saxophone quartets, Durch, in memoriam G. Grisey, composed in 1998 while he was still a student of Gerard Grisey, took a new turn during its writing as a result of Grisey's sudden passing. The piece became simpler, more linear, a metaphor for life and death. The expressive dimension of the music in Durch emerges from varying degrees of vocality, through transitions from playing clearly articulated notes to noisy impulses, to the implied extinction of expressiveness through the loss of the voice. Durch has rapidly become a classic in the repertoire of many saxophone quartets.
If Levy's work, with its many references to non-European music, literary and visual arts, Greek mythology, contemporary history, linguistics, philosophy, sociology or ecology, can be described as a haven of networked thinking, his triptych of three amplified voices and orchestra, De l'art d-induire en erreur, completed in 2019, epitomises this artistic virtue.
