Biographie / Biography
Independant but attentive to musical trends and schools, composer Sophie Lacaze has developed a personal and original aesthetic that aims to restore music to its primary purposes, such as ritual, incantation, and dance, as well as its connections to nature, with timbre playing a central role. It was during her first trip to Australia, in 1996, that she discovered Aboriginal culture. Since then, she has emphasized a return to the very essence of musical art and fundamental purity.
The sounds of nature, then those of the planets and moons in our solar system – derived from transformations of electromagnetic waves captured by NASA probes – have gradually become her main sources of inspiration.
After graduating in engineering, Sophie Lacaze turned to music. She obtained the diploma in composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, then she studied composition at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana di Siena (Italy) with Franco Donatoni and Ennio Morricone, attended Pierre Boulez’s classes at the Collège de France and took up musical theatre with Georges Aperghis at the Centre Acanthes. In 2002, she was invited for a residency at the Electronic Music Unit at the University of Adelaide (Australia).
Her catalogue now includes some one hundred works, ranging from solo pieces to orchestral works, as well as three operas and mixed works, which are regularly performed in France and abroad. Her music can be found on some fifteen CDs (France, Germany, Romania, Australia, USA), and has been the subject of numerous articles and a documentary film produced by Mezzo TV (2012).
In 2018, the book ‘Sophie Lacaze, portrait d’une compositrice – dialogues with Geneviève Mathon’ was published by Editions Delatour.The English version was published in 2021.
A winner of several international competitions, she was also awarded the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs (2009) and the SACEM’s Claude ARRIEU prize (2010). In 2023, she won the ‘100 femmes de culture’ award, a distinction which aims to highlight the inspiring and creative voices of French-speaking women of culture.