Born and brought up in Kortrijk, Frédéric D’Haene started studying music in his home town before attending the music academy in Ghent. He then enrolled at the Royal Conservatoire in Liège, where he was taught by Frederic Rzewski and Walter Zimmerman and received guidance from Henri Pousseur and the Slovene composer Vinko Globokar (1934). In 1986, he graduated with a degree in musicology from Ghent University, writing a dissertation on Webern’sVariations for Orchestra. Keen to expand his knowledge further, in 1988 he attended the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, a leading venue for avant-garde music. He was also introduced to Japanese court music (gagaku) by Tadatoshi Miyagawa. He worked as Frederic Rzewski’s assistant at the Conservatoire in Liège from 1990 to 1996 and taught aesthetics at the Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst in Ghent (1999-2000) before deciding to focus entirely on creation, moving to the Netherlands where he lived  as a freelance composer. He returned to Belgium in 2009, setting up the non-profit-making association De Muziekautarchie, with the objective of improving composers’ socio-economic status.

 

He mainly writes commissioned compositions, in his developed technique of ‘paradoxical coexistence’ for mostly traditional formations, but he also composed work combining a gagaku orchestra with a chamber orchestra in Music with silent aitake’s for example. His music has been performed by countless musicians and ensembles. They include Geoffrey Magde, Frederic Rzewski, Wibert Aerts, Daan Vandewalle, Yutaka and Saori Oya, Marianne Schroeder, Claude Coppens, Jean-Pierre Peuvion, Armand Angster, David Cohen, Wim Konink, James Wood, Champ d’Action, The BRTN Philharmonic orchestra, the L’art pour l’art Ensemble, the Danel Quartet, Q-02, the Phoenix Trio, Hermesensemble ,Musiques Nouvelles, Het Collectief, to name just a few. His varied work comprises orchestral music, chamber music, pieces for solo instrument and vocal music.

 

His work has been performed in many places in Belgium and abroad, such as in deSingel, many editions of the Ars Musica festival, Transitfestival, the Blackheath concert Halls, London, the Edmonton New Music festival and many others.

His most recent creation “Fluxus –static friction” took place in December 2013 by Het Collectief, conducted by Robin Engelen, in Tilburg, the Netherlands;  the next creation  “ Hearing from nowhere-part 3”(2010-2011) will take place in Geneva by the ensemble Contrechamps, conducted by Michael Wendeberg on the 14^th of october 2014. The creation of “ Music with silent aitake’s” is planned on January the 25^th 2015 by the Ensemble Modern and Raigakusha, but still needs a definite confirmation.

 

Contact : 

frederic.d.haene@telenet.be