Born in Strasbourg in 1992, Etienne Haan has completed his Composition studies at the Conservatory of his hometown, where he studied with Annette Schlünz, Thierry Blondeau, Philippe Manoury, Tom Mays and Daniel d’Adamo. After successfully completing his Bachelor exam in Strasbourg, Etienne Haan entered the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik in Berlin for a Master's degree in Composition, where he studied with Hanspeter Kyburz (2017-19). He is "artist diploma" in the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin in the class of Jörg Widmann in 2024/25.
Simultaneously to his composition studies, he studied Conducting, first with with M. Etchegoncelay (Strasbourg) and then with M. Fabricius (Berlin). He finished his Master's degree in Conducting at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska in Madrid (2022-23), supervised by Borja Quintas. Haan is specialising in contemporary music conducting, and attended multiple workshops with Jean-Philippe Würtz, William Blank, Titus Engel, and more recently with Peter Rundel.
In 2019-20 he was artist in residence at the Casa de Velázquez, and in 2022 he won the prize for contemporary-music composition of the city of Oldenburg (Germany). His works have been performed by professional ensembles such as Hanatsu Miroir (Strasbourg), Télémaque (Marseille), Zafraan (Berlin), Oh ton! (Oldenburg), the trio Brouwer (Barcelona), the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, and the Tonkünstler Orchester (Grafenegg, Austria).
The composer’s skills include instrumental and electronic composition, and also transdisciplinary collaborations with other artists. Among them, with the Slovak choreographer Alica Minar, the Spanish painter Keke Vilabelda, French film directors Marine de Contes and Mariette Feltin, the German architect Hans Walter Müller, and the French theatre company "Des Chateaux en l'air".
His aesthetic research is based on perception, using causal effects and other tools to draw the public’s expectation and play with it. The wish of the composer is to create music that anyone can relate to, without needing any musical education but only curiosity.
Thoughts on my music practice
Music is intrinsically underspecified—it cannot transmit a precise, unambiguous message, but only offer fragments from which meaning can emerge. This fundamental indeterminacy is not a shortcoming; it is the very space where interpretation becomes possible. In my compositional practice, I do not seek to tell a story, but to create the conditions for one to be imagined.
Narrativity, in this context, arises not from the music itself, but within the mind of the listener. This idea, rooted in the work of thinkers such as Monica Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, Michel Imberty, or Paul Ricœur, underpins my interest in the concept of the cognitive frame—a notion they helped articulate. The cognitive frame refers to the set of shared mental structures and expectations that enable an audience to construct a narrative or interpretive experience from fragmented material. These elements do not impose meaning—they suggest it, encourage it, make it possible.
This framework implies a specific relationship to time. In my work, I understand time as something constructed jointly by the listening body and the musical object. Sound unfolds in time, but it also shapes how time is perceived. Drawing from phenomenology—particularly Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserl’s temporal schema—I see musical time not as a linear sequence of instants, but as a field where retention (immediate past), primal impression (present), and protention (anticipated future) coexist and interact. This is how a melody—or any musical event—can be grasped as a form in motion.
Helmut Lachenmann’s distinction between sound as object and sound as process also plays a key role in my thinking. I often work with perceivable processes—musical events whose internal change can be tracked—because they create expectations and suggest trajectories. In this way, time is not simply a container for events, but a dynamic structure co-created by listening.
I am also aware that prolonged exposure to a single material—especially if it is rich or complex—can lead the listener to abstract it, to stop hearing its internal variety. At that point, they begin to expect either a transformation or the appearance of a contrasting object. As a composer, one of the challenges is to anticipate these perceptual thresholds and shape the music accordingly, to avoid uniformity without defaulting to contrast for its own sake.
To communicate within this open framework, I turn to Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson), which emphasizes the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience. This is possible because composer and listener inhabit the same world: we experience the same reality, shaped by similar perceptual and cultural structures. Causality becomes a useful tool in this context. By shaping musical material to evolve through perceivable transformations, I can suggest lines of cause and effect. The listener, recognizing these as part of their own experiential logic, perceives coherence, tension, or development—not because these are inherent, but because they resonate with shared expectations.
When it comes to anthropomorphism, I do not treat musical elements as characters in any fixed sense. Rather, I work on their potential to become characters—on their capacity to generate a sense of agency, gesture, or interaction. Through dynamic behaviors or contrasting profiles, sounds can begin to feel animated, as if they were capable of intention. This blurs the line between material and metaphor, inviting the listener to project subjectivity onto abstract forms.
With intertextuality, I make use of what Irène Deliège calls external similarity, as opposed to internal similarity. Internal similarities are those perceptual relationships that exist within the work itself—between motifs, textures, or forms. External similarities, by contrast, are those that connect the music to something outside it: a genre, a reference, a memory. Using an external similarity can trigger recognition, resonance, or even critical distance. It is not about quotation or pastiche but about placing the listener in relation to something beyond the work, allowing that extra-musical association to enrich their interpretive process.
Contemporary music is not background music. It demands attention. It invites the listener to enter a situation of heightened awareness, where sound, gesture, and time are actively perceived—not passively consumed. This fundamental characteristic of the music I write is what leads me to compose for the concert space.
My music is conceived for the concert setting, and this context is not incidental—it is essential. It provides a unique sensory and cognitive environment that allows me to work with:
- A margin of variability, especially in electronics, which introduces openness and spontaneity. This approach was strongly influenced by my former teacher Philippe Manoury, whose early work helped shape the development of Max software, now widely used for real-time interaction.
- The theatricality of live performance—gestures, presences, silences—that contribute directly to how meaning is constructed in real time.
- The spatiality of sound production: the bow against the string, the breath in a clarinet, the hammer striking a piano, the directional projection of a loudspeaker. These are not neutral delivery systems—they are part of the music’s expressive identity.
- In a world saturated with noise, the concert offers a rare opportunity to hear silence.
This active listening is all the more important because the very categories we use to hear—like "noise" and "tone"—are not fixed. Pierre Schaeffer showed that repeating a so-called noise can lead us to hear it as musical, as a tone with identity. Pierre Boulez, in Penser la musique aujourd’hui, writes that in the lowest register of the piano, pitch perception can collapse entirely: the instrument becomes a source of noise. And Diana Deutsch’s research shows how easily our brains misinterpret sound—reconstructing non-existent melodic lines or hearing ascending intervals as descending, depending on context. These ambiguities of perception—between tone and noise, between presence and illusion—are central to my exploration of musical form and texture. They remind us that listening is not just passive reception, but an act of interpretation in itself.
Ultimately, I aim to compose not just sound, but situations of listening. I create environments in which the audience is invited to interpret, project, and imagine. The score sets the path, but it is in the listener’s mind and body that the music truly comes to life.