After graduating in engineering, Sophie Lacaze turned to music. A graduate of the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, she went on to study 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 to take up a residency at the Electronic Music Unit at the University of Adelaide (Australia).
In 2023, her catalogue includes over 80 works, ranging from solo pieces to orchestral works, including two operas and mixed works, which are regularly performed in France and abroad.
Performers include the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (dir. Pierre-André Valade), the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (dir. Aziz Shokhakimov), the Orchestre National d’Auvergne (dir. Baldur Brönnimann), the Orchestre de Perpignan Méditerranée (dir. Daniel Tosi), the BBC Symphony Orchestra (dir. Sakari Oramo), I Solisti Veneti (dir. Claudio Scimone), the Orchestra Națională Radio România (conductor Horia Andreescu), the Orchestra Filarmonica Mihail Jora di Bacau (conductor Ovidiu Balan), the Orchestre de Flûtes Français (conductor Pierre-Alain Biget), the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain (conductor Bruno Mantovani), the Chœur Calliope (conductor Régine Théodoresco), the Mora Vocis ensemble, …
A winner of several international competitions, Sophie Lacaze has also been awarded the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs (2009) and the SACEM’s Claude Arrieu Prize (2010).
Sophie Lacaze does not belong to any particular school or musical movement, but has forged a personal and original aesthetic that seeks to restore to music its original vocations, such as ritual, incantation and dance, and its links with nature, and in which timbre plays a central role. It was during her first trip to Australia in 1996 that she discovered the culture of the Aborigines. Since then, it has been essential for her to return to the very essence of the art of music, to its fundamental purity.
A committed artist, she has been defending contemporary music for over 15 years, directing festivals such as Turbulences Sonores in Montpellier and Musiques Démesurées in Clermont-Ferrand, and giving lectures. She is also the founder of the French association of women composers Plurielles 34.
