Pascal Le Boeuf, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Music and Technology, and Contemporary Music Ensemble Director, has been awarded a prestigious 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition. Le Boeuf is among 171 fellows selected this year for excellence in scholarship and the arts.
Described as “sleek, new” and “hyper-fluent” by the New York Times, Pascal Le Boeuf is a twice GRAMMY-nominated composer, jazz pianist, and electronic artist whose works range from modern improvised music to hybridizing notation-based chamber music with production-based technology.
“I am honored, grateful, and humbled to be awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition,” said Le Boeuf. “I’ve been working behind the scenes over the last six years to reevaluate how composers approach the modern orchestra. This classic instrumentation is a gold standard in contemporary music and will continue to be so in the future. After hundreds of years of tweaking, its myriad instrumental combinations and idiomatic techniques have matured to arrive at a sound we are all familiar with—on the concert stage, on television, and in academic discourse. But for many living composers, the orchestra is intimidating, financially inaccessible, and its rich history and powerful associations make it difficult to approach creatively.
“As a composer/producer, I believe the end result is not the score or the performance, but the recording (and sometimes the music video). There are many creative choices that influence a piece of music that transcend page and performance. I believe every stage of the production process is a part of composing the music.
“I am excited to use the Guggenheim Fellowship period to create new orchestra music in a production-based environment that engages creatively with both improvising musicians, notation-based musicians, and recent studio technologies to recast the modern orchestra in a new form.”
In addition to his solo releases, Le Boeuf writes and records with his brother, saxophonist Remy Le Boeuf. The fourth album from Le Boeuf Brothers, HUSH, will release April 21 on SoundSpore Records.
