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Michel-Georges Brégent |
 Biography |
Michel-Georges Brégent was born in Montréal in 1948 [and died on September 4, 1993]. His composing career began in 1965 with Grande Toccate-Sonate Barbare and the first version of his important biblical fresco Les Testaments. In 1967 he enrolled at the Montréal Conservatory, studying in the composition class of Gilles Tremblay. The originality of his artistic temperament was already beginning to manifest itself in unusual musical enterprises. His ambition was "to create music that is perfectly balanced between the intellectual, emotional and spiritual: music that has a 'raison d'être'."
Geste, a work with aleatoric elements, was the first of his compositions to be performed widely: in Boston, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and the USSR. Atlantide, a radio work commissioned by the CBC French network, was awarded runner-up prize at the 1985 Prix Italia competition (an international competition for radio broadcasters), and another work, Trad-Sens Concertio, was commissioned by the Montréal Symphony Orchestra for its 1986-87 season.
The well-known Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich has said of Brégent that "he is a mystical visionary whose acute intelligence leads him to storm, with greatest confidence, the strangest utopias. Brégent is also a composer whose complex structures and great instrumental virtuosity are expressed in generous, flamboyant music".
Although Brégent was strongly influenced by serialism, his compositions cannot be typecast, for what he has retained from the discovery of serialism is not its techniques, but the general principle that "all the emotions can be expressed most precisely with the support of mathematics". Moreover, he has always considered himself as a composer of tonal music, given that his works are constructed according to the natural harmonic series. "Based on this," says Brégent, "anything is possible when you create multiple levels of tension between the brain and the heart."
PROCAN, Canadian League of Composers
1987
