Philippe Chamouard was born in Paris. He has always been keen to distance himself from any influence or school. That’s why, in 1987, he decided to destroy all his previous scores.

After studying piano with Guy Lasson (a pupil of Alfred Cortot) and harmony, counterpoint and composition with Roger Boutry (a pupil of Nadia Boulanger), Philippe Chamouard entered the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where he obtained a doctorate on the orchestration of Mahler’s symphonies. Fascinated by the Austrian composer, he devoted a book to him, “Mahler tel qu’en lui- même”, published in 1989 and reissued in 2006. Honorary member of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in Vienna, editor at Deutsche Grammophon, he taught music writing at the Université de Paris IV until 2004.

It wasn’t until 1992 that the composer decided to perform his symphonic scores again, which were programmed in France and abroad (Poland, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Latvia, El Salvador, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Germany, Vietnam, USA…).

Encounters with Maurice André and Ennio Morricone prompted him to pursue his quest for a language shared by composer, performer and listener. Rejecting a purely intellectual and theoretical conception of creation, the sources of his inspiration, based on essentially harmonic writing, are linked to a sound aesthetic and an ideology imbued with humanism and spirituality.

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