Christian Sebille
Composer
Appointed in 2011 as director of the GMEM, the National Center for Musical Creation in Marseille, Christian Sebille serves in the dual roles of director and composer.
Beginning in 1983, he devoted himself to electroacoustic music, which he studied with Jean Schwartz (Gennevilliers Conservatory) and Philippe Prévost (IRCAM), and then, in 1987, to mixed media music at La Muse en Circuit with Luc Ferrari.
In 1993, he founded Césaré in Reims, which became the National Center for Musical Creation in 2006 and whose artistic direction is focused on openness and the convergence of artistic disciplines and styles.
Christian Sebille’s catalog includes more than seventy vocal, instrumental, electroacoustic, and mixed-media works. Beginning in 1998, he developed computer-based instrument design, which allowed him to explore the fields of improvisation and real-time performance both in France and abroad. (Alex Grillo, Philippe Foch, Matt Bourne, Miquèu Montanaro…). From 2002 to 2013, he created a large-scale series of musical installationstitled *Les 13 miniatures*, in which he explored the concepts of space and landscape—elements that have since characterized and defined his artistic practice.
Since 2009, a series titled*Les concerts radiophoniques* has involved staging performances in which all electroacoustic elements (interviews, sound recordings, real-time processing, sound effects) are combined with the presence of musicians to create a live radio production. The most recent ones, created with Philippe Foch (percussion), juxtaposed the two industrial sites of Donges (Pays de Loire) and Martigues (Étang de Berre). The most recent piece was commissioned and presented as part of the DigitIZMir festival (Izmir, Turkey) in 2024.
Since 2018, Christian Sebille, in residence at CIRVA (International Center for Research on Glass and Art), has been working onthe project*Paysage de Propagations*, a series of projects that takes on a wide variety of presentation formats, such as installations, performances, and concerts.
Since 2022, he has been creating a series of performed electronic pieces. The first was commissioned by the Chaillol Cultural Center (Le chant des cimes); the second, *Embrasser un arbre embrasserle temps* (2022–2025), is a landscape performance with choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh in which the question of landscape and space remains central.
In 2025, Christian Sebille will create *En voiture, une Musique-Fiction* (a series for an ambient sound installation—IRCAM-Centre Pompidou) based on an original text by Olivia Rosenthal.