Marc-André Dalbavie was born in France in 1961 and studied at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP) with Marius Constant (orchestration) and Pierre Boulez (conducting).

From 1985 to 1990, he was a part of the musical research department of the IRCAM, where he explored digital synthesis and computer-assisted composition. The first work he created at the IRCAM, Diadèmes, brought him international attention, and is a regular feature in the touring repertoire of the Ensemble intercontemporain.

In 1992-1993 he traveled to Berlin on a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and in 1995-1996, he was a resident of the Villa Médicis in Rome. He has taught orchestration at the Conservatoire de Paris since 1996.

Marc-André Dalbavie won the Composition Prize of the Salzburg Easter Festival and in 1998 was named “Best Young Composer of the Year” by USA Today. In 1998-99 he was a composer-in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra, and in 2000, he was a composer-in-residence with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. For four seasons starting in 2001, he was a composer-in-residence with the Orchestre de Paris. He was the guest of honor of the Présences de Radio France Festival in 2005. In 2010, he was awarded the SACEM’s Grand Prix for symphonic music.

Dalbavie has successfully opened contemporary music in many different directions, and this has made him one of the most widely performed composers of his generation. He has received commissions from the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Orchestre de Paris, the BBC Symphony, the Montreal Symphony, and the Tokyo Philharmonic, and from musical institution such as Carnegie Hall, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the London Proms, the Aspen Music Festival, the Marlboro Festival, and the the Cité de la musique in Paris.

Marc-André Dalbavie’s work is based on research into timbre and the phenomenon of sound as they are linked to electronics. Notably, he relies on the notion of process and spectral writing, which he seeks to develop and expand to other musical parameters. Space is another central preoccupation for him, and his compositions include a number of spatialized acoustic piecces that give the listener a sense of being immersed in a space that is in continuous transformation: in Non-lieu (1997), for example, the stage is empty, and the performers - four women’s choirs and an instrumental ensemble - are located throughout the hall, surrounding the audience. Some of his pieces are written specifically for the halls or venues in which they are premiered, and some of them are in situ works in the vein of the visual art of Daniel Buren, modifying the very context of the traditional concert. Thus, Mobiles (2001) for choir and orchestra was composed specifically for the performance space at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, while Rocks under the Water (2002) was written for the Peter Lewis residence in Cleveland, designed by the architect Frank O. Gehry.

In parallel to this approach, Dalbavie’s work seeks to exploit the full potential of the orchestra, from sonic diffraction to full orchestral sound, applying an overall principle of “morphing” to glide between the two. Pieces for orchestra include his Sinfonietta, which premiered at the Festival Présences in 2005, Variations orchestrales sur une œuvre de Janáček, which premiered at Century Hall in Tokyo in 2006, and La Source d’un regard, which premiered in a performance by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, conducted by George Benjamin, in 2007.

His innovative approach has allowed him to lift several modernist taboos, including a return to consonance and sounding rhythmic pulsation, which he redeployed in concertos such as Concerto for piano (2005) and Concerto for flûte (2006), and in certain chamber music pieces, such as Trio n°1 (2008) and Quatuor avec piano (2011), as well as to melodic fluidity in vocal performances, through a rethinking of the relationship between text and music. After Sonnets de Louise Labé for countertenor and orchestra (2008), he wrote his first opera, Gesualdo, which premiered in Zurich in 2010.