Jean Schwarz

Jean Schwarz (Lille, 20 May 1939) is a French composer whose output lies between electroacoustic music, dance and film. His career combines experience in jazz, the study of non-European musics and the practice of musique concrète, a field in which he was trained.

After studying music in Paris and Versailles, he divided his activity between jazz drumming, research into extra-European musics and composition. In 1969 he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, where he took a full part in the adventure of musique concrète. He later combined teaching electroacoustic music at the National Music School in Gennevilliers with engineering work at the National Centre for Scientific Research, within the ethnomusicology department of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

His output encompasses concert works, with and without live instruments, film scores for directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and ballets for Carolyn Carlson, among them Year of the Horse and Undici onde, premiered at the Paris Opera in 1978 and at La Fenice in Venice in 1981. He favours electronic sounds as raw material for building large architectural forms, and at times draws inspiration from non-European musics, as in Anticycle or Mosaïques.

His legacy lies in having integrated electronics, jazz improvisation and the sonic culture of other traditions into a language of his own, with powerful and contrasting structures.