Pierre Jodlowski
French composer born 9 March 1971 in Toulouse.
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Survey of works by Pierre Jodlowski
Introduction
Describing Pierre Jodlowski as a composer is somewhat reductive: he is also an author, a publisher, a scenographer, a choreographer, a photographer, a director, a bassist, a keyboardist, a philosopher, a designer… the list goes on. This means his oeuvre cannot be confined to musical scores and electronic compositions; it also includes stage performances (Artaud Corpus Fragments, White Zero Corporation, Music Violence and Other Stories), conceptual pieces (Soleil Blanc, Ghost Woman), and technological designs for installations (Grainstick, Passage).
Moreover, the parameters of Jodlowski’s “oeuvre” encompass countless forms — even to the detriment of content, at times. As Jérémie Szpirglas noted,
Taking in a Pierre Jodlowski piece is never simply a matter of listening. One way or another, he calls on the other senses, too — not to mention imagination and awareness. Indeed, the show often begins before the artists take to the stage and ends long after the last note is played.1
In Jodlowski’s world, the concept of “pure music” has no meaning. Each creation — he insists on the term “project” — is the fruit of prolonged reflection, substantial and wide-ranging preparatory research, and a necessity to work collaboratively, with dancers, jugglers, video artists, and the audience. Musical composition itself — the act of realization — by contrast, is often a brief, intuitive, and direct step in the process.
A rapid survey of Jodlowski’s oeuvre reveals a striking homogeneity and continuity, with the exception of a significant shift around 2014-2015 when he turned his focus to intensifying his work’s orientation as total art. Homogeneity is perceptible in his use of electronics, in the predominance of solo and chamber works over orchestral pieces, and in certain instrumental preferences, such as for pairing piano and percussion (a combination he admires in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte). He also persists in a desire to challenge the logistical and artificial structure of the traditional concert (artist enters, applause, conductor bows, etc.) in favor of “rituals” that are carefully thought out and painstakingly prepared. These rituals are a key feature of his celebrated “projects.”
The meticulous care Jodlowski devotes to realizing each project is equally evident in the way he oversees the logistics, production, and distribution of his work. Over his career he has founded several contemporary arts festivals (in Toulouse, France, and in Poland), a studio (éOle), a record label (éOle Records), and his own publishing house for his scores. His comprehensive website pierrejodlowski.fr provides streamlined access to each work through audio and video recordings, scores, program notes, and other documentation, without intermediaries such as the media or publishers.
Instead of a chronological overview of his work, it seems that a parameter-based approach will be more effective in identifying his work’s central issues: an approach that is itself in keeping with Jodlowski’s own creative strategy.
Themes
Jodlowski’s approach does not explore merely musical or even artistic questions. Every work is the outcome of a vision. In his words, “each project must be SEEN before it becomes.” This vision, this mental image, is generally linked to an ideological and sociological consideration. One of the central commitments of his work is to speak out against the failings of contemporary society. He takes on the world’s disenchantment and decay (Post Human Computation); the drifting of consciousnesses (Collapsed); our relationship to others, to time, to money, and to the economic and social systems (People / Time, Time and Money); lies in the press, the disappearance of chance as metaphor for a controlled, vacuous society (Diary, Random and Pickles); time’s acceleration as new means of communication and transport (Hyperspeed Disconnected Motions); and the submission of bodies and minds to norms or to excess (Respire).
Certain mental images recur. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now has perhaps left the deepest imprint on the composer’s own language. He refers to it frequently and claims that it distills his own aesthetic and psychological concerns. The film concentrates absurdity and violence, while its music serves a grandiose, and even grotesque, mise-en-scène (for example, the famous scene in which helicopters fly in formation against the musical backdrop of Ride of the Valkyries). The richness of its visual planes, the scientific precision of the editing, and many other features of Apocalypse Now permeate Jodlowski’s thinking and writing.
The piece Something out of Apocalypse (2012) refers to the film, as well as to the composer’s own discovery of it, which occurred
[…] first through the sound: a vinyl record with constant scratching sounds that nearly covered the voices of Willard and Colonel Kurtz; then I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, on which Coppola based the film. Finally, a few years later, I encountered the film itself in a dingy suburban movie theater, with just a few people in the audience.
Apocalypse Now abounds in energy and mental images, as in the famous final scene in which Colonel Kurtz’s murder by machete is paralleled by the ritual sacrifice of an ox — an outpouring of gory violence backlit and filmed with a blood-red filter. A similar climax occurs in Jodlowski’s 1998 rescoring of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike: the massacre of the workers is paralleled by scenes from a slaughterhouse.
Absurdity, violence, and blood, as well as the contrast that can be struck between them, also show up elsewhere. One example is Série blanche (2007) for piano and stereo soundtrack, inspired by François Leterrier’s film Un roi sans divertissement adapted from Jean Giono’s novel of the same name. The film’s wintry setting is saturated in white, against which the red of blood is imposed in the final scenes. In Série blanche, the coldness of the overall writing contrasts with sudden ruptures that shatter the musical discourse. The same idea returns in L’aire du dire (2011), whose concluding narrative (excerpted from Christophe Tarkos’s Anachronisme) returns to the theme of wintry coldness. The first series of (dodeca-)haiku opening the work — written by Jodlowski — plays on homonymy: “il n’y a pas de neige sans [sang] qu’il y ait de trace” (there is no snow without blood / wherever there is a trace). Série rouge (2017) is devoted to the many mental images associated with blood.
Extramusical references
Before composing, Jodlowski undertakes a phase of preparation and documentation. Each project emerges from prolonged reflection that generates, among other things, the central problematic and material of the score. Once a topic has been chosen, Jodlowski assembles an imposing collection of sources before moving on to the creation of the piece itself. His “database” of references includes literature, cinema, sociology, philosophy, and various technologies, but certain themes and patterns stand out.
Cinema occupies a central place in this referential universe. Alongside Apocalypse Now, Jodlowski has engaged extensively with the work of David Lynch. Coppola and Lynch share a number of aesthetic preoccupations: a sense of the absurd, pervasive uncertainty, and frequent narrative twists. Jodlowski’s catalog contains several references to Lynch, including excerpts from Dune in Série noire (2005) and Lost Highway in Série rose (2012); the deep, obsessive bass sounds in Drones (2007); and an allusion to the series Twin Peaks in Twins Peak (2015). Other cinematic touchstones include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (Série noire), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (Ghostland, 2017), and, as mentioned, Eisenstein’s oeuvre.
Notable literary sources include Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game (Mental Vortex, 2001), the incomplete 53 Days by Georges Perec (Jour 54, 2009), the poetry of Henri Michaux (La Ralentie, 2018) and Alda Merini (Ombra della Mente, 2013, and San Clemente, 2019), Fernando Pessoa’s violent and incisive Le Livre de l’intranquillité (De Front, 1999) and Ultimatum (Ultimatum, 2016, and Soleil noir, 2015), and the theater of cruelty conceptualized by Antonin Artaud (Artaud Corpus Fragments, 2006).
His work nods to conceptual and scientific perspectives (Criogenesis, 2007, Induction, 2014, and Holons, 2017). The visual arts and architectural spaces also inspire his work. Série bleue (2013) pays tribute to the work of Yves Klein, while Coliseum (2008) echoes the structure of the amphitheater of Nîmes and the composer’s thoughts on its history. Is it this? (2001), for its part, evokes a map of Berlin and Jodlowski’s discovery of the city that same year.
San Clemente (2019), a project for soprano, instruments, video, stage design, lights, and electronics, illustrates the way Jodlowski brings various parameters together, starting with a mental image, often charged with ideological significance, and weaving into it multiple musical and extramusical references. The piece is a tribute to an island in the Venetian Lagoon, once a mental hospital and now a luxury hotel. The musical component of the work quotes the poems of Mérini, who was once interned there. The video projects a dancer moving through the hallways and gardens of the present-day hotel, reenacting in situ the gestures of the patients in Raymond Depardon’s documentary filmed on the eve of the hospital’s closure in the early 1980s.
Many of Jodlowski’s recurring concerns converge in this project: madness, voice, gesture, a network of references to literature and cinema, and the inexorable passage of time. In Depardon’s film, black-and-white images of psychiatric patients convey the weight of confinement and historical memory. By contrast, Jodlowski’s own film introduces color and the apparent freedom of the dancer, Annabelle Chambon. In both cases, San Clemente remains a site of confinement: once for psychiatric patients, now for the wealthy.
Montage, gesture, experimentation
Montage is a central tool in Jodlowski’s language. His approach draws on Eisenstein’s theory of the “montage of attractions,” which seeks to seize viewers’ attention through shock — violent imagery, rhythmic force, and destabilizing camera angles. In one of his writings, Jodlowski contrasts this vision of montage with that of collage:
Editing sounds, editing phrases, editing gestures; not piecing them end to end, no (and this despite 1950s-era tape), but giving them the massive responsibility of making sense from every possible angle, from the moment they are there to attempt anything other than simple seduction.2
Jodlowski injects musical discourse with new vitality through energy, contrast, rhythm, and unpredictability. This concept of montage aligns with another notion he has theorized in relation to composition: Direct Music, defined as “an intuitive understanding of the writing process, through intuition or direct energy.” In other words, it
dispenses with ready-made concepts in favor of creation that takes the present moment into account, as well as suggestions relating to electroacoustic material in the studio. The music is arranged and organized little by little in an ongoing give-and-take between the score and the writing of the electronic parts, weaving links together to provide structure in terms of rhythm, harmony, texture, and gestural energy.3
Musically, this translates to an sharp, raw, highly contrasted and rhythmic style in which the channeling of energy remains the fundamental parameter (figure 1).
This notion, which he applies to both instrumental and electronic music, also aligns with his approach to stage design (see White Zero Corp, Trio P.A.J, Music Violence and Other Stories). His concerts regularly involve a real-time electronic sound production system that he designed at IRCAM: a highly sensitive pad with 165,000 pressure values, linked to a small MIDI controller with linear and rotary potentiometers and a pressure-sensitive drawing pad with stylus. The resulting sound is thus linked to human gesture connected to the machine.
Gesture lies at the core of Jodlowski’s creative thought. As he himself states, “Gesture is not a result of writing, it is the point of departure.” Inspired by the work of Jani Christou (Anaparastasis) and Thierry De Mey (Light Music), Jodlowski treats gesture both as a musical parameter (interjection, pattern, burst, precision) and as a physical phenomenon. This thinking motivates the use of dance in many of his projects, both live performance and film projections (Mental Vortex, Respire, Ghostland, San Clemente).
From this interest in gesture follows a broader technical inquiry: how can sound be captured and generated as an extension of bodily movement? For this he uses motion sensors. The early work Time and Money (2006) for percussion, video, and electronics, requires the performer to manipulate spatialized sound through physical gesture. In the multimedia project Grainstick (2010), Jodlowski adapts video-game-style joysticks to control sound sources in the performance space. Sensors also appear in instrumental works, such as Ready Mad(e) (2018) for violin, guitar, keyboard, drums, electronics, and ironing boards fitted with sensors and treated as musical instruments.
These experiments form part of a long-term approach Jodlowski develops as his ambitions and needs evolve. As new techniques, technologies, and electronics emerge, he reconfigures his projects to integrate them.
Pervasive electronics
Jodlowski employs electronics in their many forms: fixed media, real-time systems, live processing, sensors, installations, and beyond. The medium often depends on the nature of the commission — whether it comes from IRCAM or an individual performer, for example — or on practical constraints, such as writing competition pieces for performers with little experience in interactive settings. Whatever the circumstance, however, Jodlowski refuses to place electronics and more traditional instruments in hierarchy. In this, he differs from his predecessors Pierre Boulez, whose Répons and Anthèmes 2 extend instrumental writing through heterophonic real-time processes, and Stockhausen, whose Hymnen invites instrumental improvisation alongside tape. For Jodlowski, electronic and instrumental sound worlds are conceived symbiotically, so that they dialogue and enrich each other in the same musical thought.
In addition to preexisting sound banks, Jodlowski collects sounds from real-life situations. For The Strike, for example, he spent two days in Europe’s largest steel plant, in Fos-sur-Mer, to gather sound samples and immerse himself in the huge scale of the place before formalizing his relationship to the film image. His approach was similar for Barbarismes, which uses sounds he recorded at a farrier’s forge.
Studying an electronics piece is no simple matter: the music rarely follows conventional rules for analysis. Jodlowski argues that his own language should be understood through its differences in timbral color; notation, for its part, should be schematic, yet precise, in order to simplify rehearsals (figure 3). In his concern for playability, he has consistently rejected the use of score-following approaches.
The question of form
Jodlowski’s penetrating instrumental writing and use of electronics often produce organic forms, shaped by the sounds being used or by the elements under development, as in Éclats de Ciel and Collapsed. In this respect, his music stands closer to Stockhausen’s “moment form” than to “formula.” Nevertheless, certain formal patterns recur throughout his work. Among them is a principal of construction based on the juxtaposition of phases. Many of his pieces thus unfold in distinct parts (usually two or three), determined by underlying concepts (Respire, Diary, Random & Pickles) and changing instrumentation (Time and Money, Mad Max, Ready Mad(e)).
Mad Max (2017) is made up of three distinct parts:
- the protagonist mimes mounting an imaginary motorcycle, triggering electronic sounds through motion sensors (harsh timbres, motorcycle noises, and surging energy),
- a seduction scene in which a woman’s mouth is projected onto a bass drum,
- a virtuosic concluding vibraphone solo against a background sound evoking Darth Vader-like breathing.
The work’s overall unity is established by the protagonist. The performer is asked to play a character modeled on George Miller’s Mad Max: an unhinged, uncontrollable, hateful, violent, macho, brutal, and illiterate figure, built on the exaggerated stereotype of a stupid, lawless biker (the performer even urinates onstage). As so often in Jodlowski’s work, the strictly musical elements of the performance are submitted to the message, the aesthetic conception, and the stage setting itself.
Some works are organized around the alternation or complementarity of two contrasting structure types, as in People/Time or in the opposition between narration in the “Shadow” sections and singing in the “Singing” sections of Ombra Della Mente. The same principle extends to works on a larger scale. Ghostland, for example, is subdivided into three independent pieces (“Holons,” “Büro,” and “Pulse”).
Jodlowski takes large-scale stage projects as an opportunity to examine themes or techniques from multiple angles. Thus, L’aire du dire explores speech by contrasting the vacuousness of ambient chitchat with misleading language and falsehoods spread through social media, creating a flow of words that becomes increasingly hard to process or control. To construct this panorama, the work draws on haiku, folktales, speeches, and prayer, all held together by recurring excerpts from Tarkos’s Anachronisme, which return like the refrain of a rondo. Jodlowski adopts a similar organizational technique in Soleil noir, where excerpts from Shakespeare’s Henry V provide structural cohesion.
Voice is essential in each of these projects, for both its declamatory force and its capacity to organize and destabilize form. In Jour 54, a radio commission for France Culture’s program Atelier de création radiophonique, fragments of Perec’s incomplete novel 53 Days — words, phrases, expressions — are entered, permuted, and reorganized over time. A similar process takes place in the interjection “Is it this?” and in the sequences of (dodeca-)haiku in L’aire du dire.
Elements of musical analysis
Jodlowski is not doctrinaire about writing by systems. To the contrary, he claims an extreme freedom of writing without limits. As a result, some of his pieces can seem difficult to access, whether in performance or on the page. Much of this stems from his incisive and chaotic style (as in Direct Music), but also from the chronic absence of recurring elements, and thus a lack of reliance on memory or models. For example, in Dialog/No Dialog, “the material is very lively, jubilant, and that’s all.”
Even so, one can discern processes stemming from a dialectic between electronics and instrumentals, such as echo effects, harmonic extensions, and spectral extractions. One of the rare scores in which Jodlowski explicitly addresses the question of instrumental material is Série noire. It is also possible to identify certain features of his musical language, as well as influences, notably the music of John Coltrane and his use of cellular development; for example, the four-note motive of Sun Ship appears in Chorus 1A (2003). Another is tempi clashing in a rapid flux that makes it impossible to arrive at a fixed pulse, pointing once again to the fundamental principle of energy. In Ghost Haend (2015), for example, a five-note cell is transformed and set in phase displacement; it is also modeled on the hand’s natural position on the keyboard (figure 4).
Jodlowski also admires the piano music of Cecil Taylor and has devoted considerable time to analyzing it. He is drawn to Taylor’s radically free approach to playing, which combines improvisation and dense clusters played with his fists. Jodlowski’s Séries contain references to this influence (figure 5).
Jodlowski often uses polarities to give a work formal coherence: for example, the high and low B-flats in Post Human Computation (2014). In Mixtion (2002), he similarly exploits the two extreme pitch poles of the tenor saxophone (B and B-flat) at different points in the piece, before they come together in the final section (figure 6).
Another feature is certain motifs that reappear from one work to another, such as the following chordal structures:
Although the three chords are not hierarchically ordered, the G-sharp chord asserts a particular prominence. It opens Série noire and operates in it as a kind of signal that structures the work. All three can be found in the second climax (figure 7).
They appear again in Série blanche (loops 21-22) and as arabesques in Série rouge (2017) (figure 8).
These essentially pianistic structures — which allow for a comfortable placement of the hands on a keyboard — also appear in ensemble pieces such as Coliseum (where they announce the coda), Respire, and Drones, functioning as indelible markers of organicism in Jodlowski’s work. It would be easy to make similar observations of other patterns (clusters or arabesques) according to the instrument involved: the clarinet in Ombra Della Mente or the guitar in Post Human Computation. These gestures seem to emerge from instrumental reflexes — physical habits and responses specific to each instrument — and once again point back to Jodlowski’s concept of Direct Music.
Conclusion
The above observations raise certain questions: Is it necessary to be familiar with the many references and reflections underlying Jodlowski’s work in order to listen to or understand it? Must listeners likewise be able to identify the electronic sounds he uses and transforms? Jodlowski’s answer seems to be no. He even sometimes appears to be intentionally blurring those sounds and references. Thus, the epigraph to a preparatory sketch for De Front (1999) is a phrase from Pessoa that appears neither in the score nor in the performance notes. More revealingly, the electronic part for the Ghostland ritual (2017) includes poems (by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich Heine) that are likewise left unmentioned elsewhere.
A similar approach is at work in the transcriptions of his electronic scores. At times they describe the events to be produced with great precision; at others they remain deliberately elliptical. In either case, they seem to be ghosts of a problematic whose full contours may never be disclosed to the audience. The written prefaces that accompany his works, reproduced on Jodlowski’s website, nonetheless allow readers to glimpse the breadth of references and preparatory reflections that inform each project.
To conclude, I propose a simple answer to a simple question: what one thing should one do to understand Pierre Jodlowski’s work? Watch Apocalypse Now, and listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte.
1. Jérémie SZPIRGLAS, “Sillage: de l’ombre à l’après,” published in the liner notes for the DVD Ombra, éOle Records, 2015. ↩
2. Pierre JODLOWSKI, “Collage / Montage — un point de non-rencontre,” unpublished, 2005. Accessible on the composer’s website: http://www.pierrejodlowski.fr/site/index.php?post/Collage-/-Montage-un-point-de-non-rencontre (link verified in March 2026). ↩
3. Liner notes for the CD Direct Music, éOle Records, 2013. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?