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Paul Méfano was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1937.
My childhood took place in the cradle of the Bible, in Mesopotamia, then in Syria. My parents held no religious beliefs, they had never baptized me; I was baptized secretly by our cleaning lady, who came from the mountains. … I was about six years old. I was deeply mystical and visionary, and often hallucinated. For me, this mysterious, dark-skinned lady, who spent her life enshrouded in veils, came straight from the Bible, and I believed she was destined to know me and to understand me. … Since I distanced myself from all that, I have lived my life in this sort of selfishness that we teach human beings, but I do not accept it and I hope one day to be able to rid myself of this.”1
Méfano lived in Syria, where his father narrowly escaped an assassination, then in Beirut, a deeply francophone city, and in Israel, which was then Palestine. As a young, Jewish musician, he spent several months in a pioneering kibbutz and later fought in the left-wing Zionist movement Borochov-Dror. As a conductor, he often played works by Jewish composers, such as Charles-Valentin Alkan, Gideon Klein, Darius Milhaud, Viktor Ullmann, and Émile Waldteufel. In his youth, Méfano had a taste for mathematics and painting. He abandoned both of these passions at the age of eighteen, for “a far more abstract path in music.”2
Arriving in Paris in 1945, he met Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique. Cortot helped and encouraged him to study music theory and piano, by playing his own music. After several months of music theory, in 1958 Méfano joined the Conservatoire in Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger’s studio. “She considered me to be an extremely useless and enigmatic student … I knew nothing at the time,” he said. He also studied in Milhaud’s studio, whose open-mindedness and generosity Méfano always praised. But the Conservatoire of this period had many obstacles. During these formative years, Florent Schmitt, whose Salomé he had admired, often accompanied him to concerts and recommended certain pieces to him. At the same time, from 1958 to 1960, he learned of, and grew interested in, serial music.
After studying the writings of Pierre Boulez and attending his Domaine musical concerts, Méfano enrolled in his composition and analysis class at the City of Basel Music Academy from October 1961 to the summer of 1962, according to the notes he took in lessons. Then, from February to May 1962, he enrolled in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s lessons, and from October 1963 to February 1964 those of Henri Pousseur, in parallel to Milhaud’s teaching. He also attended the Darmstadt Summer Sessions in July 1963, where he went to the conferences and roundtables by Boulez, Pousseur, and Luciano Berio. At the Conservatoire, he studied with Olivier Messiaen for one year in 1964 and was in Jean-Pierre Guézec’s analysis class. This period corresponded to his first concert in France. Boulez programmed Méfano’s Paraboles on 20 January 1965 at the Domaine musical, under the direction of Bruno Maderna. Paraboles triggered a scandal at the Conservatoire Composition Prize, with the Orchestre Radio-Lyrique, to whom Méfano presented a funeral wreath as a sign of his displeasure.
In 1960, Méfano married pianist Jacqueline Migault. In the same year, they had a daughter, Nathalie, who died in 1989. Some of her paintings had strong connections to Méfano’s work. Her poem inspired Douce saveur... (Sweet Flavor…) in 1983, and her presence is noticeable in Ensevelie (Buried) in 1986. He spent 1966 to 1968 in the United States, where he visited the deserts, had a brief stay at Princeton, and spent several months in New York, before attending the University of California, Los Angeles, where he spent the year studying applied ethnology with a young Javanese man. During this stay, he discovered other conceptions of music, such as the jazz music of trumpeter Don Ellis, who greatly impressed him. He also met Leonard Stein, who was assistant to Arnold Schoenberg, and Lawrence Morton, an admirer of Méfano and a specialist in the work of Igor Stravinsky. From 1968 until 1969, he went to Berlin where he met Maderna, with whom he became close friends.
On his return to France, he performed various jobs, such as copyist and corrector. He was appointed cultural councilor in Champigny-sur-Marne in 1970 and created the Ensemble 2e2m in 1972. He directed the ensemble in concerts in France and abroad, actively participating in musical life by discovering and supporting many other composers. Méfano recorded about forty discs with the Ensemble 2e2m and opened doors to China, Korea, Armenia, Israel, Japan, and the Arab world. During this period, he also rediscovered musicians such as Alkan and the Czech composers who were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1940. From 1972 to 1988, he was director of the Conservatoire de Champigny-sur-Marne, before becoming professor of composition, then orchestration, at the Conservatoire de Paris (1989-2002), where he taught Thierry Blondeau and Bruno Mantovani, among many others. From 1996 to 2005, he was director of the Conservatoire de Versailles. In 2008, Méfano was the founding member of the Circle for the Liberation of Sound and Image, working at the cross-section of influences between composers and visual artists. In 2013, he was invited to be a resident at LabEx GREAM (Groupe de recherches expérimentales sur l'acte musical) and the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg.
Méfano was named Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite in 1980 and a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985. He also received the Koussevitzky Prize in 1967, the Florence Gould Award in 1971, the Prix Arthur Honegger in 1976, the Grand Prix National for music in 1982, and the Prix Sacem for symphonic music in 1989. Méfano died on 15 September 2020 in Chilly-Mazarin.
The Paul Méfano Collection is held at the National Academic Library in Strasbourg.
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