Daniel CHARLES

Daniel Charles, as a musician (studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris : Premier Prix, 1956) and as a philosopher (agrégation, 1959 ; Doctorat d’Etat under the direction of Mikel Dufrenne, 1977), founded and chaired the Department of Music at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) for twenty years (1969-89), taught General Aesthetics for ten years (1970-80) at the University of Paris-IV (Sorbonne), and served as Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis for nine years (1989-99), where he became Professor Emeritus in 1999.

He has written extensively on the aesthetics of contemporary music and is most renowned in the anglophone world for his conversations with the late John Cage, published as For the Birds (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981). This important work was reissued in 2002, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of the composer.

Daniel Charles's first six books were translated into German at Merve Verlag, two have appeared in Japanese, and he has more recently published three books in French: Musiques nomades, edited by Christian Hauer (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998) and La fiction de la postmodernité selon l'esprit de la musique (PUF, Thémis, Philosophie, 2001), and Gloses sur John Cage (Paris: Broché, 2002).