Trained in Colombia, the United States and France, Juan Pablo Carreño studied composition at the Javeriana University in Bogotá with Guillermo Gaviria and Harold Vásquez, graduating in 2003. The same year, he received a scholarship from Florida International University in the USA, where he studied for a Master’s degree with Orlando Jacinto García, and worked as a theory and composition teacher. On arriving in Paris, he joined Jean-Luc Hervé’s composition class at the Conservatoire de Nanterre. He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire in 2010, where he continued his composition studies in Gérard Pesson’s class, and was taught by Claude Ledoux, Michaël Levinas, Tom Mays and Luis Naón, among others.

In 2008, he co-founded the ensemble Le Balcon, with whom he develops what he calls “disjunctive music”, in relation to the doubling of sound phenomena through sound reinforcement, the idea of a hybrid ensemble and the transmutation of contexts into musical abstractions in search of new forms of function for his music.

A resident at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Médicis) from 2011-2013, he was also selected to work in New York in 2012 as composer-in-residence with the International Contemporary Ensemble in the ICELab program.

In 2006, he won the artistic residency program of the Colombian Ministry of Culture and Mexico’s Fonca. He took part in Salvatore Sciarrino’s composition course at the Acanthes center in 2008, where he also met Philippe Hurel, Oscar Strasnoy and Unsuk Chin in 2011.

In 2010, he was invited as composer-in-residence at the Festival Musique sur ciel, in the Tarn region of France, which commissioned Golpe en el diafragma. His music has been performed in several countries in the Americas and Europe by ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC), International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Ensemble 2e2m and Ensemble Musicatreize. He has collaborated with conductors such as Ludovic Morlot, Jean Deroyer, Fabián Panisello, Pierre Roullier, Maxime Pascal, Kanako Abe, Jean-Philippe Wurtz, Ricardo Jaramillo, Pierre Strauch and Roland Hayrabedian. He is currently writing a chamber opera on an original libretto by Sylvain Coher, commissioned by the Opéra de Marseille and the Musicatreize ensemble, which will premiere in December 2015 at the Théâtre de la Criée, Marseille.

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