Philippe Bodin is a French composer and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow whose music has been commissioned by Radio France, TM+, Orkest de Volharding, and numerous ensembles throughout Europe and North America. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and Yale University, where he later taught composition, he lived and worked in the United States for two decades before returning to France in 2011. Before composition became the principal focus of his work, Bodin studied mathematics, physics, architecture, piano, organ, and voice, and pursued parallel activities as a singer, teacher, vocal coach, conductor, and composer. Over the course of a decade, he performed leading operatic roles and sang with ensembles specializing in Renaissance and Baroque repertories, experiences that continue to nourish his sensitivity to language, vocal writing, and musical drama. No single stylistic label comfortably describes Bodin's music. His catalogue encompasses orchestral, chamber, vocal, and choral works of widely differing character. Some are abstract studies in musical transformation, others spring from poems, literary ideas, natural phenomena, or improbable premises. From intimate chamber works to large spatialized choral works, each composition seeks its own character and expressive world. Perhaps the most striking feature of Bodin's music is the coexistence of contrasting impulses: abstraction and theatricality, rigor and fantasy, humor and gravity, intimacy and monumentality. A motet inspired by an ancient saint may stand alongside a bestiary of eccentric animals; a meditation on northern lights beside the existential diary of a bar of soap. Throughout these varied worlds run a number of persistent concerns: canonic writing, processes of transformation, palindromes and symmetries, and a fascination with musical time — its expansion, compression, suspension, and sometimes its seeming negation. This freedom to move between worlds gives his work an unmistakably individual voice. As LA Weekly observed, Bodin is “an original composer with something important to say.”