Dmitri Kourliandski is a composer born in Moscow in 1976 and based in France since 2022. He studied composition with Leonid Bobylev at the Moscow Conservatory. His work encompasses orchestral and chamber music, opera and music theatre, electronics, sound installation and interdisciplinary projects.
A central concern of Kourliandski’s work is the idea of music as an object or environment rather than as narrative. Instead of treating musical material as something that necessarily develops toward a goal, he often constructs situations in which sound can be observed from within. He has described this approach as “objective music” — music understood not primarily as narrative, but as an object, spatial situation or environment in which listening itself becomes a form of creative practice.
His music has been presented at major international festivals including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ruhrtriennale, Venice Biennale, Holland Festival and Milano Musica, among others, and performed by orchestras and ensembles such as the SWR Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre national de Lyon, musicAeterna, Ensemble intercontemporain, Contrechamps, Schönberg Ensemble and Quatuor Diotima. His work has received numerous distinctions, including the Gaudeamus International Composers Award, the Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award, the Johann Joseph Fux Opera Composition Prize and the Franco Abbiati Prize. His scores are published by Donemus and Éditions Jobert / Henry Lemoine.
Kourliandski was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD in 2008 and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2025–26. Alongside composing, he has taught, lectured and given workshops and masterclasses internationally. His pedagogical interests increasingly converge with his artistic practice around questions of perception, attention and listening.
For Kourliandski, artistic practice has always had an underlying political dimension. To compose is to create a community of sounds and to establish the laws according to which its members coexist. At the same time, by choosing particular forms of organization and establishing relationships with historical musical models, composers inevitably reproduce, question or transform models of social and political organization. In this sense, no musical system is ideologically neutral: the relationships constructed between sounds can also be understood as models of relationships between individuals, communities and structures of power.
Alongside his work as a composer, Kourliandski was actively involved in building an infrastructure for contemporary music in Russia. He initiated and organized educational, concert and interdisciplinary programmes, published a journal, and gave lectures, seeking to create spaces for exchange between composers, performers, artists and audiences. With the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, this activity became impossible to continue. Kourliandski publicly opposed the war and left Russia with his family in 2022, settling in France.
The rupture of 2022 also changed the context in which his artistic practice exists. Questions of displacement, memory and belonging entered into dialogue with concerns that had long been central to his work: the organization of communities, the relationship between the individual and systems of power, and the possibility of constructing alternative forms of coexistence through artistic practice.
In recent years, his practice has increasingly expanded beyond the conventional concert situation. The cycle Rituels vides examines musical situations in which familiar objects and rituals remain present while their conventional functions are removed or displaced. Sonic Scores reverses the usual relationship between performer and electronics: prerecorded sound becomes a score to which the live musician responds. Across such projects, composition becomes less the production of a self-contained musical work than the construction of a situation — a set of conditions within which sound, performer and listener establish changing relationships.
Under the parallel identity Kourliandski 2.0, he also works with electronic music outside the institutional framework of contemporary classical music. His project espaces bruts explores extended sound environments derived from abandoned recordings, unfinished sketches and digital debris. Rather than functioning as individual tracks, these materials form potentially continuous spaces for listening, memory and attention.
Across these different practices, Kourliandski’s work increasingly shifts the emphasis from composing musical objects to constructing conditions for perception. The composition is not only what is written or heard, but also the situation in which listening takes place. In this sense, composition becomes simultaneously an artistic, perceptual and political practice: a way of proposing possible relationships between sounds, people and the world they inhabit.
← Home