The product of several different kinds of training, Alexandre Jamar began studying composition at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Paris with Allain Gaussin, then José Manuel López López. He also studied opera singing at the conservatoire, first with Doris Lamprecht before specializing in early music with Caroline Bardot. From 2020, Jamar studied instrumental composition with Gérard Pesson at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he also studied new technologies in classes led by Yan Maresz, Luis Naón, and Grégoire Lorieux. In addition to his studies in music, Jamar completed a master’s degree in cultural administration at Sciences Po in 2018.

Jamar performed as a tenor with the chamber choir accentus, and it is through lyric singing that he approaches writing music. In opera, and more specifically in the tradition of early music, the text and the music are equally important to the composition. Jamar borrows from the constrained writing techniques of the experimental literary group Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, roughly translated as “workshop of potential literature”), such as lipograms, hapax legomenon, formal symmetry games, arbitrary forms, and more. In Four Songs from the Bell Jar, he and American poet Nazifa Islam wrote four poems following a constrained writing process that prohibited repetition, declensions, or the addition of words. The elimination of words over the course of the poems progressively reveals the musical substance of the work. These constraints can also be applied to the writing of the music itself. In We will not waste a vowel (a title referencing the novel La Disparition [The Disappearance] by Georges Perec), one of his chosen constraints is the use of ascending scales as the only medium of composition. Commissioned by IRCAM and the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France following the awarding of the Prix Elan, this piece will be premiered at the ManiFeste festival in June 2023.

Jamar’s works have been performed by the Ensemble Itinéraire, the United Instruments of Lucilin, the Ensemble Cairn, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the Orchestre de Picardie.