MUSIC AS A STAGE
Portrait of the composer Pierre Jodlowski
by Monika Pasiecznik
Aleksander Wnuk – Mad Max 2023 – © Klaudyna Schubert
Pierre Jodlowski describes himself as a composer, performer, and multimedia artist, but in his projects he frequently also assumes the roles of scenographer, stage director, as well as video and lighting designer. In the works of this musician, born in Toulouse in 1971, electroacoustic composition, free jazz, and post-rock intersect with light and cinema, editing and gesture. Themes such as toxic masculinity, homosexuality, or the search for his own origins make his works as striking as they are charged with tension. A portrait of an artist who is not tied to a single homeland—neither musical nor geographical.
For Pierre Jodlowski, taking on an artistic or stage role simultaneously means adopting a new perspective and accessing music in a global way. Rather than distinguishing between elements such as sound and gesture, image or meaning, he works with all these parameters in parallel. He is at once a musician, performer, stage director, multimedia artist, and scenographer.
The point of convergence of all these heterogeneous elements is electronics, without which it is difficult to imagine Pierre Jodlowski’s music. His extensive catalogue includes solo and chamber music works—almost all with electronics, and many also incorporating video, light, and scenography. Purely instrumental music is represented by only a few pieces, while works for electronics alone are even rarer. By contrast, scenic forms, multimedia music theatre, performance, and sound installations occupy a privileged place.
TECHNOLOGY AS AN INTERFACE
Pierre Jodlowski acquired his technical skills at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, where he completed a course of study after studying musicology, music theory, and composition in Toulouse and Lyon. The programme of this renowned centre for electronic music, founded by Pierre Boulez, also shaped his compositional approach.
Jodlowski’s works are distinguished by a high level of musical production quality. However, neither a scientific or experimental perspective, nor sophisticated interactive systems, programming, or sound spatialisation constitute the core of his artistic concerns. For him, technology is an interface that connects the various elements of a complex and heterogeneous artistic language, in which sound cannot exist without gesture, light, video, or meaning. It allows him to move beyond a narrow definition of music and to embed it within a dense network of references to literature, cinema, and sociocultural themes. It is therefore not about technique for its own sake, nor about the mere pleasure of its possibilities, but rather about the desire to say something meaningful through it—and to do so in a deeply expressive and intelligible way.
On a strictly sonic level, Jodlowski creates tension through energetic post-rock and references to free jazz. Like Fausto Romitelli, he seeks to integrate elements of these genres into experimental contemporary music. Among his instruments of choice, alongside electronics, are the electric guitar—which he plays himself—heavily saturated and richly reverberated, as well as a rhythmic drum kit with a quasi-improvised character and the saxophone, whose sonorities he combines with the refined structures of classical composition: a combination of fire and water, of rock energy and the precision of contemporary music.
Jodlowski nevertheless refers to Jani Christou. The Greek visionary conceived music as a ritual. Driven by the desire to transcend the fixed form of the classical concert by introducing gesture and image into the very heart of music, Jodlowski likewise seeks to create an intense musical experience. In his work, the vitality of improvisation and the desire to concentrate and savour the raw energy of the musical moment are united with the staging of the performance itself.
The music is dramaturgically conceived with unusual precision, as if one were witnessing the projection of a breathless film—a true “montage of attractions.”
Limbus – Hyperduo 2023
CINEMATIC MONTAGE IN MUSIC
“Cinema is very important to me. One of the first works I composed was the music for Eisenstein’s film Strike. I was twenty-six at the time and received a commission that plunged me into great anxiety: I had to write an hour and a half of music for a cinematic masterpiece. I worked on it for two years. During the first year, I read Eisenstein’s writings and studies devoted to his work. His theoretical text entitled The Montage of Attractions quickly became one of the most important texts for me. Eisenstein describes his working method using still images. In Strike, for example, the longest shot lasts only one and a half seconds. His films are an uninterrupted succession of complex montages of very short shots. Thanks to this text, I understood my own way of working with sound material. Since then, I have worked with sound in a cinematic way.”¹
The notion of montage is essential to understanding Jodlowski’s compositional strategy. As we have seen, he learned from Eisenstein how to capture the attention of listeners through dramaturgical and psychological devices: the dynamics of change, richness of perspectives, and maximum energy. Jodlowski even uses the symbol of scissors in the score in the form of a “cut gesture.” This indicates the interruption or abrupt and precise stopping of a musical action, a sound, or a gesture—of the head, hand, or body—by the performer.
Jodlowski favours contrasts, energetic rhythm, sonic power, and the unpredictability of events. In this way, he constructs true musical narratives, which he often enriches with fragments of cinematic dialogue and explicit references to popular culture.
Many of his works contain references to films by David Lynch (Série Noire, Série Rose, Drones, Twins Peak), Francis Ford Coppola (Something out of Apocalypse), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Ghostland), Terry Gilliam and Jean-Luc Godard (Série Noire), as well as George Miller (Mad Max). The cinematic character of Jodlowski’s music is manifested in the search for dramatic drive and constant tension, but also in the quest for common ground between experimentation and the collective imagination, nourished by powerful and evocative images. These images, which often arise solely in the minds of listeners, sometimes take on a very concrete and suggestive form, such as the erotic connotations of Série Rose, which do not merely evoke the love dialogues of Lost Highway but are also partly inspired by pornographic films.
Insulae – PHACE ensemble 2025 – © Markus Bruckner
“THE MUSICAL ACT IS PROFOUNDLY SCENIC”
The richness of references to the works of other artists is not limited to cinema. Literature, dance, and the visual arts are just as essential to Jodlowski. In Jour 54 (2009), he conceives a diary in the manner of Georges Perec; in De Front (1999), he draws on the writings of Fernando Pessoa. Série Bleue (2013) is a tribute to Yves Klein, while Série Cendre (2022) is inspired by the paintings of Gerhard Richter. All forms of art nourish Jodlowski’s creative imagination and bring music closer to a semantic and performative stage art that engages all the senses, conveys meaning, and often tells a story. He does not rely solely on technology (electronics, video), but also on the performers’ direct gestures and on theatrical elements.
In December 2022, Touch for double bass and electronics and Série Cendre for piano and electronics were premiered at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. These two solo pieces were enough to generate a performance entitled Clair-obscur, both visually striking and dramaturgically sophisticated, lasting nearly an hour and combining sound, gesture, light, and poetry.
According to Jodlowski, the musical act is “profoundly scenic”². By this he means that music is not composed solely of sounds, but also of gestures. In works such as IN & OUT (2007) for violin and cello or N, N, N (2001) for a dancer and a motion-sensor setup, he explores the relationships between musical performance and gesture. These are sometimes abstract categories, but very often also concrete scenic representations.
Jodlowski’s oeuvre includes numerous pieces that make use of scenography, costumes, and musical performance. The boundary between autonomous work, performance, and music theatre is fluid, especially as he integrates performers into the dramatic action by having them assume roles. In Mad Max, a percussionist creates sound effects dressed in biker gear and wearing a helmet equipped with motion sensors—a three-act performance devoted to the theme of toxic masculinity. In San Clemente (2019), the pianist performs, in a ritual gesture, on disassembled elements of the piano—a frame set upright and a keyboard placed on the floor—symbolising the psychological degradation of the patients of the former psychiatric hospital that operated on the island of San Clemente in Venice until the 1980s. In another scene, the pianist picks up a keytar, a keyboard worn over the shoulder, to evoke a rock band together with the other musicians on stage.
“One of the most important artistic themes for me is the question of representation: what the body is on stage. I dislike acousmatic concerts solely because of the lack of humanity of loudspeakers. I use electronics as a means of defining a space, which can be a virtual instrument, the acoustics of a place, or even music in public space. I also use electronics to extend the possibilities of acoustic instruments, which ties in with one of the main research dynamics at IRCAM, where I worked for some time. But what interests me most is ritual—such as in Jani Christou’s work Anaparastasis II: The Pianist, composed in 1968, one of the most important pieces I have ever discovered and one that truly corresponds to what I myself seek in music. When I integrate light, video, or gesture, it is out of the deep conviction that scenic representation, in the traditional form of the concert, has reached its limits. To this end, I employ all available means.”³
An example of ritual in the spirit of Jani Christou is Ghostland (2017). It is a form of performative installation involving four large bass drums arranged in space, stroboscopic light, electronic sounds, and video; four barely visible musicians (Les Percussions de Strasbourg), their heads covered with hoods, cross the stage like ghosts.
ROOTS
In one of his most recent stage works, Alan T. (2021), Pierre Jodlowski draws on the biography of the famous mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1952 fell victim to homophobic laws in Great Britain. Because of his homosexuality—then considered a crime—Turing was subjected to chemical castration and committed suicide shortly thereafter. Jodlowski also highlights the contribution of Polish mathematicians to the deciphering of the Enigma code, a story that remains largely unknown outside Poland.
Born in France, Pierre Jodlowski settled in Poland some fifteen years ago. He bears the name of his grandfather, who emigrated from Poland to France in the 1920s. The catalyst for this move toward Poland was an invitation to the Musica Electronica Nova festival in Wrocław in 2011, extended by the Polish composer Elżbieta Sikora, the festival’s director and a pioneer of electronic music.
Today, he divides his time between Poland and France, moving between his two countries of anchorage. He nonetheless refuses to choose: he defines himself first and foremost as European.
1. Monika Pasiecznik: “Polska nie zmieniła mojej muzyki. Rozmowa z francusko-polskim kompozytorem Pierrem Jodlowskim,” Odra, no. 7–8, Wrocław, 2017.
2. Pierre Jodlowski: “Gesture, a Matter of Composition,” INOUI no. 1, IRCAM, Paris, 2006.
3. Pasiecznik, ibid.
