Claudine Simon is a pianist and sound artist who experiments with lutherie and the possibilities offered by her instrument.
She trained as a performer at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse de Paris with Jean-François Heisser, Marie-Josèphe Jude and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and has had many encounters that have nourished her artistic practice. As a performer, she is committed to defending the works of the repertoire as well as those of living composers.
Today, she is developing projects at the frontier of several fields : between sound and visual creation, theatre and movement, revisiting the piano and its imaginary world.
In 2021, she created Pianomachine, a choreographed solo with a piano hybridised by machines, followed by Anatomia in 2023 (premiered at the Musica festival in Strasbourg), a Lisztian recital that becomes anatomical theatre.
In 2025, she will create An additional courntry, a form for young people and all audiences that is somewhere between a visual installation and sound theatre.
She was commissioned by the Festival Printemps des Arts in Montecarlo to create a new work of music-theatre in April 2026.
She is a prizewinner in the Mondes Nouveaux call for proposals, and receives writing grants from the Fondation Beaumarchais-SACD. She has also been commissioned by the CNCM (GMEM, Césaré, Ici l’Onde) and the Printemps des Arts Festival. Her work has been performed at the Bouffes du Nord, the Philharmonie de Paris, Operas (Lyon, Reims, Dijon, Rennes), La Criée, Scènes Nationales and Scènes Pluridisciplinaires in France.
Reimagining the world of the piano |
After conducting research through improvisation on the prepared piano, I am currently developing stage projects that broaden the scope of the piano and renew its instrument making.
What drives me is to give substance to this experimental treatment of the piano through composition and stage performance. For me, it is about inhabiting the piano in a different way — exploring its history, challenging its conventions, the ways of playing it, hearing it, re-enchanting it. And this is always done through a cross-disciplinary approach, where music inspires and is nourished by the visual arts, dance and theatre.
I often create my shows based on a piece from the repertoire. My choice is made intuitively — by the nature of a fragment, an emotion, an event, or the memory of something absolutely moving that leaves a mark and connects me to a work. I am connected to it perhaps because I have spent a long time with it, working on it, reflecting on it, absorbing it, performing it in public… The piece then acts in retrospect like a ghost that haunts me, a recurring object, an insistent presence.
I work on it in a kind of decomposition — then recomposition of the material. But what happens, what takes place, is a moment when sound reasserts itself, becomes the primary thing again — a free sound, freed from the rules and laws imposed on it by musical tradition.
This practice of decomposition is not destructive but generative: it opens up the work to new possibilities of existence, to other modes of listening. It is my current, non-exhaustive way of inventing my own musical forms and rules.
Beyond the musical material, decomposition becomes a true mode of thinking. Freeing oneself from inherited gestures, questioning the customs and constraints that structure our relationship to classical music, undoing dominant representations: these are all ways of reappropriating a language, a body, a way of listening.
Recomposing then means inventing new grammars and new architectures — creating new arrangements that question our relationship to heritage and creation. Thinking of creation as composting: where what is undone nourishes what is to come, materially and spiritually.
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