Pierre Jodlowski
French composer born 9 March 1971 in Toulouse.
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Survey of works by Pierre Jodlowski
Introduction
Describing Pierre Jodlowski as a composer is somewhat reductive: he is also an author, a publisher, a set designer, a choreographer, a photographer, a director, a bassist, a keyboardist, a philosopher, a designer… the list goes on. This means his oeuvre cannot be confined to musical scores and electronic compositions; it also includes stage performances (Artaud Corpus Fragments, White Zero Corporation,Music Violence & others stories), conceptual pieces (Soleil Blanc, Ghost Woman), and technological designs for installations (Grainstick, Passage).
Moreover, the parameters of Jodlowski’s “oeuvre” encompass countless forms — even to the detriment of content, at times. As Jérémie Szpirglas noted,
Taking in a Pierre Jodlowski piece is never simply a matter of listening. One way or another, he calls on the other senses, too — not to mention imagination and awareness. Indeed, the show often begins before the artists take to the stage and ends long after the last note is played.1
In Jodlowski’s world, the concept of “pure music” has no meaning. Each creation — he insists on the term “project” — is the fruit of prolonged reflection, substantial and wide-ranging preparatory research, and a necessity to work collaboratively, with dancers, jugglers, video artists, and the audience. Musical composition itself — the act of realization — by contrast, is often a brief, intuitive, and direct step in the process.
A rapid survey of Jodlowski’s oeuvre reveals a striking homogeneity and continuity, with the exception of a significant shift around 2014-2015 when he turned his focus to intensifying the total art dimension of his work. Homogeneity is perceptible in his use of electronics, in the predominance of solo and chamber works over orchestral pieces, and in certain instrumental preferences, such as piano and percussion pairings (he admires Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte). He also persists in a desire to challenge the logistical and artificial structure of the traditional concert (artist enters, applause, conductor bows, etc.) in favor of “rituals” that are carefully thought out and painstakingly prepared. These rituals are a key feature of his celebrated “projects.”
The meticulous care Jodlowski devotes to realizing each project is equally evident in the way he oversees the logistics, production, and distribution of his work. Over his career he has founded several contemporary arts festivals (in Toulouse, France, and in Poland), a studio (éole), a record label (éOle Records), and his own publishing house for his scores. His comprehensive website pierrejodlowski.fr provides streamlined access to each work through audio and video recordings, scores, program notes, and other documentation, without intermediaries such as the media or publishers.
Instead of a chronological overview of his work, it seems that a parameter-based approach will be more effective in identifying his work’s central issues: an approach that is itself in keeping with Jodlowski’s own creative strategy.
Themes
Jodlowski’s approach does not explore merely musical or even artistic questions. Every work is the outcome of a vision. In his words, “each project must be SEEN before it becomes.” This vision, this mental image, is generally linked to an ideological and sociological consideration. One of the central commitments of his work is to speak out against the failings of contemporary society. He takes on the world’s disenchantment and decay (Post Human Computation); the drifting of consciousnesses (Collapsed); our relationship to others, to time, to money, and to the economic and social systems (People / Time, Time & money); lies in the press, the disappearance of chance as metaphor for a controlled, vacuous society (Diary, Random and Pickles); time’s acceleration as new means of communication and transport (Hyperspeed Disconnected Motions); and the submission of bodies and minds to norms or to excess (Respire).
Certain mental images recur. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now has perhaps left the deepest imprint on the composer’s own language, and he refers to it frequently. According to Jodlowski, it distills his own aesthetic and psychological concerns. The film concentrates absurdity and violence, while its music serves a grandiose, and even grotesque, mise-en-scène (for example, the famous scene in which helicopters fly in formation against the musical backdrop of Ride of the Valkyries). The richness of its visual planes, the scientific precision of the editing, and many other features of Apocalypse Now permeate Jodlowski’s thinking and writing.
The piece Something out of Apocalypse (2012) refers to the film, as well as to the composer’s own discovery of it:
[…] first through the sound: a vinyl record with constant scratching sounds that nearly covered the voices of Willard and Colonel Kurtz; then I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, on which Coppola based the film. Finally, a few years later, I encountered the film itself in a dingy suburban movie theater, with just a few people in the audience.
Apocalypse Now abounds in energy and mental images, as in the famous final scene in which Colonel Kurtz’s murder by machete is paralleled by the ritual sacrifice of an ox — an outpouring of gory violence backlit and filmed with a blood-red filter. A similar climax occurs in Jodlowski’s 1998 rescoring of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike: the massacre of the workers is paralleled by scenes from a slaughterhouse.
Absurdity, violence, and blood, as well the contrast that can be struck between them, show up elsewhere in Jodlowski’s work. Série blanche (2007) for piano and stereo soundtrack, inspired by François Leterrier’s Un roi sans divertissement adapted from Jean Giono’s novel of the same name, is one example. The film’s wintry setting is saturated in white, against which the red of blood is imposed in the final scenes. In Série blanche, the coldness of the overall writing contrasts with sudden ruptures that shatter the musical discourse. This same idea returns in L’aire du dire (2011), whose concluding narrative (excerpted from Christophe Tarkos’ Anachronisme) returns to the theme of wintry coldness, while the first series of (dodec)haïku opening the work — penned by Jodlowski — plays on homonymy: “il n’y a pas de neige sans [sang] qu’il y ait de trace” (there is no snow without blood / wherever there is a trace). Série rouge (2017) is devoted to the many mental images associated with blood.
Extramusical references
Before composing, Jodlowski undertakes a phase of preparation and documentation. Each project emerges from prolonged reflection that generates, among other things, the central problematic and material of the score. Once a topic has been chosen, Jodlowski assembles an imposing collection of sources before moving on to the creation of the piece itself. His “database” of references includes literature, cinema, sociology, philosophy, and various technologies, but certain themes and patterns stand out.
Cinema occupies a central place in this referential universe. Alongside Apocalypse Now, Jodlowski has engaged extensively with the work of David Lynch. Coppola and Lynch share a number of aesthetic preoccupations: a sense of the absurd, pervasive uncertainty, and frequent narrative twists. Jodlowski’s music contains several references to Lynch, including excerpts from Dune in Série noire (2005) and Lost Highway in Série rose (2012); the deep, obsessive bass sounds in Drones (2007); and an allusion to the series Twin Peaks in Twins Peak (2015). Other cinematic touchstones include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (Série noire), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (Ghostland, 2017), and, as mentioned, Eisenstein’s oeuvre.
Notable literary sources include Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game (Mental Vortex, 2001), the incomplete 53 Days by Georges Perec (Jour 54, 2009), the poetry of Henri Michaux (La Ralentie, 2018) and Alda Merini (Ombra della Mente, 2013 and San Clemente, 2019), Fernando Pessoa’s incisive, violent writing in Le Livre de l’intranquillité (De Front, 1999) and Ultimatum (Ultimatum, 2016 and Soleil noir, 2015), and the concept of theater of cruelty conceptualized by Antonin Artaud (Artaud Corpus Fragments, 2006).
His work embraces conceptual and scientific perspectives (Criogenesis, 2007, Induction, 2014, and Holons, 2017). The visual arts and architectural spaces also inform his work. Série bleue (2013) pays tribute to the work of Yves Klein, while Coliseum (2008) echoes the amphitheater of Nîmes and the composer’s thoughts on its history. Is it this? (2001), for its part, evokes a map of Berlin and Jodlowski’s discovery of the city that same year.
San Clemente (2019), a project for soprano, instruments, video, stage design, lights, and electronics, illustrates the way Jodlowski brings various parameters together within a work, starting with a mental image, often charged with ideological significance, and weaving into it multiple musical and extramusical references. The piece is a tribute to San Clemente, an island in the Venetian Lagoon, once a mental hospital and now a luxury hotel. The musical component of the work quotes the poems of Mérini, who was once interned there. The video component projects a dancer moving through the hallways and gardens of the present-day hotel, reenacting in situ the gestures of the patients filmed in Raymond Depardon’s documentary about the hospital on the eve of its closure in the early 1980s.
Many of Jodlowski’s preferred themes converge in this project: madness, voice, gesture, references to literature and cinema, and references to time’s inexorability, from the black and white images of the patients in Depardon’s film to the color and freedom of the dancer (Annabelle Chambon) in Jodlowski’s own film. In both cases, San Clemente remains a site of confinement: once for psychiatric patients, now for the wealthy.
Montage, gesture, experimentation
Montage is a central tool in Jodlowski’s language. His approach draws on Eisenstein’s theory of the “montage of attractions,” which seeks to seize viewers’ attention through shock — violent imagery, rhythmic force, and camera angles conveying the greatest possible energy. In one of his texts, Jodlowski contrasts this vision of montage with that of collage:
Editing sounds, editing phrases, editing gestures; not piecing them end to end, no (and this despite 1950s-era tape), but giving them the massive responsibility of making sense from every possible angle, from the moment they are there to attempt anything other than simple seduction.
Jodlowski’s aim is to inject musical discourse with new vitality by working through energy, contrast, rhythm, and unpredictability. This concept of montage aligns with another notion he has theorized in relation to composition: Direct Music, defined as “an intuitive understanding of the writing process, through intuition or direct energy.” In other words, it
dispenses with ready-made concepts in favor of creation that takes the present moment into account, as well as suggestions relating to electroacoustic material in the studio. The music is arranged and organized little by little in an ongoing give-and-take between the score and the writing of the electronic parts, weaving links together to provide structure in terms of rhythm, harmony, texture, and gestural energy.4
Musically, this translates to an incisive, raw, highly contrasted and rhythmic style in which the channeling of energy remains the fundamental parameter (figure 1).
This notion, which he applies to both instrumental and electronic music, also aligns with Jodlowski’s approach to stage design (see White Zero Corp, trio PAJ, Music Violence & other stories). His concerts regularly include a real-time electronic sound production system that he designed at IRCAM: a highly sensitive pad with 165,000 different pressure values, linked to a small MIDI controller with linear and rotary potentiometers and a pressure-sensitive drawing pad with stylus. The resulting sound is thus linked to human gesture connected to the machine.
Gesture lies at the core of Jodlowski’s creative thought. As he himself states, “Gesture is not a result of writing, it is the point of departure.” Inspired by the work of Jani Christou (Anaparastasis) and Thierry De Mey (Light Music), Jodlowski treats gesture both as a musical parameter (interjection, pattern, burst, precision) and as a physical phenomenon. This thinking motivates the use of dance in many of his projects, both live performance and film projections (Mental Vortex, Respire, Ghostland, San Clemente).
From this interest in gesture follows a broader technical inquiry: how can sound be captured and generated as an extension of bodily movement? For this he uses motion sensors. In the early work Time & Money (2006) for percussion, video, and electronics, he required the performer to manipulate spatialized sound through physical gesture. In his multimedia project Grainstick (2010), he adapted video-game-style joysticks to control sound sources in the performance space. He has also used sensors in some of his instrumental works, such as Ready Mad(e) (2018) for ironing boards, violin, guitar, keyboard, drums, and electronics, in which ironing boards fitted with sensors replace conventional instruments.
These experiments form part of a long-term approach developed by Jodlowski as his ambitions and needs have evolved. As new techniques, technologies, and electronics have emerged, he has continually reconfigured his projects to integrate them.
Pervasive electronics
Jodlowski works with electronics in their many forms: fixed media, real time, live processing, sensors, installations, and beyond. The nature of the electronic support may depend on who has made the commission (IRCAM or a performer, for example) or on material constraints (such as competition pieces, performers inexperienced in interactive settings). Whatever the circumstance, Jodlowski rejects any hierarchical distinction between electronics and more traditional instrumentals, unlike his predecessors Pierre Boulez (with the heterophonic real-time prolongations of Répons and Anthèmes 2) and Stockhausen (with the instrumental improvisations to accompany tape in Hymnen). Jodlowski reflects on and creates in both dimensions symbiotically, so that they dialogue and enrich each other.
In addition to preexisting sound banks, Jodlowski collects sounds from real-life situations. For The Strike, for example, he spent two days in Europe’s largest steel plant, in Fos-sur-Mer, to gather sounds and above all to immerse himself in the huge scale of the place before formalizing his relationship to the film image. His approach was similar for Barbarismes, which uses sounds he recorded at a farrier’s forge.
Studying an electronics piece is no simple matter: the music rarely follows conventional rules for analysis. Jodlowski argues that his own language should be understood through its differences in timbral color; notation, for its part, should be schematic, yet precise, in order to simplify rehearsals (figure 3). In his concern for playability, he has consistently rejected the use of score-following approaches.
The question of form
Jodlowski’s incisive writing and use of electronics often generate organic forms, shaped by the sounds being used or the elements under development (Éclats de Ciel, Collapsed). In this respect, his music stands closer to Stockhausen’s Momente than to Formule. Nevertheless, certain formal patterns recur throughout his work. Among them is a principal of construction based on the juxtaposition of phases. Many of his pieces thus unfold in two or three distinct parts, determined by:
- underlying concepts (Respire, Diary, Random & Pickles)
- changing instrumentation (Time and Money, Mad Max, Ready Mad(e)).
Mad Max (2017), for example, is made up of three distinct parts:
1. the protagonist mimes mounting an imaginary motorcycle, triggering electronic sounds through motion sensors (harsh timbres, motorcycle noises, and surging energy), ↩
2. a seduction scene in which a woman’s mouth is projected onto a bass drum, ↩
3. a virtuosic concluding vibraphone solo against a background sound evoking Darth Vader-like breathing. ↩
The work’s overall unity is established by the protagonist. The performer is asked to play a character modeled on George Miller’s *Mad Max *: an unhinged, uncontrollable, hateful, violent, macho, brutal, and illiterate figure, built on the exaggerated stereotype of stupid, lawless biker (the performer even urinates onstage). As so often in Jodlowski’s work, the strictly musical elements of the performance are submitted to the message, the aesthetic conception, and the stage setting itself.
Some of Jodlowski’s works are organized around the alternation or complementarity of two contrasting structure types, as in People/Time or in the opposition between narration in the “Shadow” sections and singing in the “Singing” sections of Ombra Della Mente. The same principle extends to works on a larger scale. Ghostland, for example, is subdivided into three independent pieces (Holons, Büro, Pulse).
Large-scale stage projects also allow Jodlowski to examine themes or techniques from multiple angles. Thus, L’Aire du Dire explores different facets of speech, contrasting the vacuousness of ambient chitchat with the misleading discourse and proliferating falsehoods of social media, creating an ever-more indigestible and uncontrollable flow of words. To construct this panorama, the work draws on a range of sources — Haiku, folktales, speeches, prayer — held together by recurring excerpts from Christophe Tarkos’s Anachronisme, which function like the refrain of a rondo. Jodlowski adopts a similar organizational technique in Soleil noir, where excerpts from Shakespeare’s Henry V provide structural cohesion.
Voice is essential in each of these projects, both for its declamatory force and its capacity to organize and destabilize form. In Jour 54, a radio commission for France Culture’s program Atelier de création radiophonique, fragments of Perec’s incomplete novel 53 Days — words, phrases, expressions — are entered, permuted, and reorganized over time. A similar process takes place in the interjection “Is it this?” and in the sequences of the (dodeca)haiku in L’Aire du Dire.
Elements of musical analysis
Jodlowski is not doctrinaire in writing according to systems. To the contrary, he claims an extreme freedom of writing, without limits. As a result, some of his pieces can seem difficult to access, whether in performance or on the page. Much of this stems from his incisive and chaotic style (as in Direct Music), but also from the chronic absence of recurring elements, and thus a lack of reliance on memory or models. For example, in Dialog/No Dialog, “the material is very lively, jubilant, and that’s all.”
Even so, one can discern a number of processes — stemming from the dialectic between electronics and instrumentals — such as echo effects, harmonic extensions, and spectral extractions. One of the rare scores in which Jodlowski explicitly addresses the question of instrumental material is Série noire.
And it is still possible to identify certain features of his musical language, as well as some of his influences, notably the music of John Coltrane and his use of cellular development — the four notes of Sun Ship appear in Chorus 1A (2003) — along with the idea of tempi clashing in a rapid flux that makes it impossible to arrive at a fixed pulse, pointing once again to the fundamental principle of energy. In Ghost Haend (2015), for example, a five-note cell is transformed and set in phase displacement; it is also modeled on the natural position of the hand on the keyboard (figure 4).
Jodlowski also admires the piano music of Cecil Taylor and has devoted considerable time to analyzing it. He is particularly drawn to Taylor’s radically free approach to playing, which combines improvisation and dense clusters played with his fists. Jodlowski’s Séries contain references to this influence (figure 5).
Jodlowski often uses polarities to give a work formal coherence. In Post Human Computation (2014), for example, he organizes the piece around the high and low registers of B-flat major. In Mixtion (2002), he similarly exploits the two extreme pitch poles of the tenor saxophone (B and B-flat) at different points in the piece, before they come together in the final section (figure 6).
The idea of recurrence emerges through certain motifs reappearing from one work to another, such as the following harmonic blocks:
These three chords are not hierarchically ordered, the G-sharp chord asserts a particular prominence. It opens Série noire and operates in it as a kind of signal that structures the work. All three blocks can be found in the second climax (figure 7).
They appear again in Série blanche (loops 21-22) and as arabesques in Série rouge (2017) (figure 8).
These essentially pianistic blocks — which allow for the comfortable placement of hands on a keyboard — also appear in ensemble pieces such as Coliseum (where they announce the coda), Respire, and Drones, functioning as indelible markers of the organicism in Jodlowski’s work. It would be easy to make similar observations of other patterns (blocks or arabesques) according to the instrument involved; for example, the clarinet in Ombra Della Mente or the guitar in Post Human Computation. The principle of the reflex, in these cases linked to musical gestures or patterns, recalls again the concept of Direct Music.
Conclusion
The above observations raise certain questions: is it necessary to be familiar with the many references and reflections underlying Jodlowski’s work in order to listen to or understand it? Must listeners likewise be able to identify the electronic sounds he uses and transforms? Jodlowski’s answer seems to be no. Indeed, he even sometimes appears to be intentionally blurring them. Thus, the epigraph to a preparatory sketch for De Front (1999) is a phrase from Ferdinand Pessoa that appears neither in the score nor in the performance notes. More revealingly, the electronic part for the Ghostland ritual (2017) includes several poems (by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich Heine) that are likewise left unmentioned elsewhere.
A similar approach is at work in the transcriptions of his electronic scores. At times they describe the events to be produced with great precision; at others they remain deliberately elliptical. In either case, they seem to be ghosts of a problematic whose full contours may never be disclosed to the audience. The written prefaces that accompany his works, reproduced on Jodlowski’s website, nonetheless allow readers to glimpse the breadth of references and preparatory reflections that inform each project.
To conclude, I propose a simple answer to a simple question: what one thing should one do to understand Pierre Jodlowski’s work? Watch Apocalypse Now, and listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte.
1. Jérémie SZPIRGLAS, “Sillage: de l’ombre à l’après,” published in the liner notes for the DVD Ombra, éOle Records, 2015. ↩
2. Pierre JODLOWSKI, “Collage / Montage — un point de non-rencontre,” unpublished, 2005. Accessible on the composer’s website: http://www.pierrejodlowski.fr/site/index.php?post/Collage-/-Montage-un-point-de-non-rencontre (link verified in March 2026). ↩
3. Ibid. ↩
4. Liner notes for the CD “Direct Music,” éOle Records, 2013. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?