Yassen Vodenicharov

Living and working in France, YASSEN VODENICHAROV graduated in composition under Prof. Dimitar Tapkov and piano under Prof. Liliana Antova at the Bulgarian National Academy of Music, Sofia, in 1990. In 1991, he studied electroacoustic music at the Group for Music Research at Radio France. At twenty-nine, in 1993, he won the grand prize of the Tenth International Contemporary Music Competition in Tokyo. In 1995, he was awarded the second prize for composition at the Paris Conservatoire, where he graduated with a degree in composition under Prof. Paul Méfano and musical acoustics under Prof. Michelle Castelengo in 1998. In 1991, he studied electroacoustic music at the Group for Music Research at Radio France. He graduated in Music and Musicology of the Twentieth Century at the IRCAM and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) at the Sorbonne under the leadership of Prof. Hugues Dufour. In 2008, he defended his dissertation thesis on the influence of traditional music outside Europe on the works of European composers from the second half of the twentieth century. In 2001, received the Beaumarchais Scholarship from the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers for his opera L'arbre qui parle (‘The Tree That Talks’), presented in the Studio-Théâtre de la Comédie Française ('Comédie Française Theatre Studio'). He was distinguished with the Jury and Audience Award at the Bruno Materna International Composition Contest, Würzburg, Germany (2005). Resident composer at the Villa Kujoyama Residency in Kyoto, Japan. Vodenitcharov is the recepient of the First Prize from the International Composition Contest for Percussion Ensembles in Marmande, France (2006), the Grand Prize for Music at the World Festival of Underwater Photography, Marseille (2008), and the André Caplet Award from the French Academy of Fine Arts (2017). He teaches music theory at the Jacques Ibert Conservatoire in Paris. Yassen Vodenitcharov has authored works from all genres: solo music, as well as chamber, symphonic, and vocal music; operatic and electronic music, performed and broadcast by prestigious foreign and Bulgarian ensembles and musicians in many European countries, in Japan, Canada, the United States, Venezuela and Australia. The liberty which he employs in recreating various compositional techniques from the twentieth century musical idiom, his interest in timbre and aesthete's attitude towards sound and musical form coexist with innate sense of ritual and accompanied by his explorations of various folk and ethnic traditions.