Cyrille Thoulen

Cyrille Thoulen (Brussels, 1979) studied sociology at the ULB before turning to Daniel Capelletti's composition class at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles.
His cultural approach is resolutely interdisciplinary, constantly drawing on the cross-disciplinary contributions of his two favourite disciplines :
- As a sociologist, he has specialised in the arts, conducting in-depth research into what contributes to creating a musician's ‘taste’, from that of the amateur performer to that which guides a composer's choices, etc. Since 2022 he has held a doctorate in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), under the supervision of Frédéric Lordon. His thesis examines the socio-logical aspects of Franz Liszt's compositional approach (Sonata in B minor).
- As a composer, he pursues, as an abyss of this interdisciplinary meeting point, a parallel work consisting in trying to establish a synthesis between different heritages, by considering what aesthetics presented as opposed (tonality, atonality, spectralism, microtonality, etc.) can in reality bring to each other as other ‘assets’. The human sciences are also regularly invited to the table, providing ideas, pretexts and experiments to be carried out (musical theatre, the detail-mass dialectic, openness to traditional music, etc.). This activity has led him to write for a wide variety of occasions, ranging from ‘pure’ contemporary music (Festival Emergence 2010, Ars Musica 2014, 2015, 2021) to more functional music : theatre (MIM, Maeterlinck Foundation in Ghent), cinema (INRACI, IAD, St-LUC, etc.), arrangements, and so on.
After teaching sociology at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège and the ULB (ISTI, 2015), he now works as a teacher at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles (Sociology, Musical Analysis and Training in Contemporary Languages) and the Académie de Wavre (History of Music).