Biography
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Born
1974 (age 50)
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Born In
Chelyabinsk, Chelyabinskaya oblast', Russian Federation
A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways. Galperine's compositions address wide-ranging subjects: from the resilience of hope in the face of destruction to meditations on the journey of the soul, as well as travels through space and through the magical forests of Max Ernst’s paintings.
Galperine studied composition at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSM), and also electroacoustic music at the Conservatoire de Boulogne (Paris).
As he noted in a recent interview with French writer and journalist Thierry Jousse, "At 25, I already wanted to compose "pure music," but I was up against a system that didn't offer many choices. I had to be a composer brought up in a post-Boulezian tradition. And as much as I could say that this tradition was not mine, I couldn't yet define what I wanted to be. My love for cinema and the possibility within the framework of film music of being able to change styles allowed me to seek my language in a fairly free way. Auteur cinema opened up new paths. Film music was a laboratory that allowed me to consider forms that were not related to cinema."
In 2017, when Galperine was ready to recommit to contemporary composition – and to begin work on Theory of Becoming – he was approached by Andrey Zvyagintsev to contribute music to a film. "Andrey asked me to do something very special: write music without reading the script and without seeing the film. Once you find yourself writing music from three sentences, without images, you are no longer a composer of film music. You have no reference points other than yourself." This work turned out to be the music to the film Loveless – which was awarded the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Among his "emotional influences" Galperine cites Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Debussy – "these are influences that made me grow as a musician" – and, among more recent composers, Pärt, Ligeti and Reich. "Slowly, I turned toward minimalism. I began to understand that with very few elements one could create great tension, and build up a great momentum. The search for a strong emotional idea and the fact of being able to create a dramaturgy with very restricted musical material are the things that fascinate me. I also wanted to try to connect the world of electroacoustic music and that of so-called "written" music.
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