Biography

Well he is a composer. Finding scarse time to write music with scarse notes. But he did that also when he had plenty of time.
Indeed the less time he has, the more notes he writes: he does not yet understand what that means.

Anyway, he ran the major classical music festival and THE contemporary music festival in his country, and has with Serge Thomassian a pioneering record label.

More and more he feels the need for global thinking and action in music. He founded an NGO 'Music Projects for Brussels' to make Brussels excel even more, from the most global of things to concerts for people who do not really want to be where they find themselves.

Most would agree he has a healthy mind, and he tries to keep his body fit. Yet he eats meat, drinks beer, and various other alcohols. Vegetables and bread are organic however. No matter how much he eats, he is thin as a razor blade. Dreams of biking again... .

Lived in France, Italy and Russia. Dresses in Ann Demeulemeester mostly.

if you wish to be more serious:

Born in Ostend, Belgium in 1958, Patrick De Clerck started composing as an autodidact. He worked in several prestigious centres for electronic music, such as the IPEM in Ghent and the IRCAM in Paris, where he created compositions based on electronic sound manipulation. At age 23, he became frustrated with the self-oriented nature of this avant-garde and brought a drastic end to his activities as a composer.

Patrick De Clerck turned over a new leaf and plunged into popular music. He played bass in a couple of alternative rock groups, but eventually this turned out to be another dead end. In the mid-eighties, while working in fashion and advertising music in Milan and Paris, Patrick De Clerck became enthused by the Italian dance society Sosta Palmizi and wrote the music for a Raffaela Giordano production. This caused him to renew his acquaintance with composing and it gradually rekindled his interest in writing non-functional oeuvres. In 1988 he wrote a chamber opera, RE, and from 1989 he once again regarded himself as a full-fledged composer.

When composing, Patrick De Clerck wants to forget earlier achievements as much as possible. He tries to build each oeuvre from the ground up instead of being led by a particular style or technique. He writes commissioned compositions for renowned orchestras and institutions such as the Belgian National Opera (La Monnaie), the Quartet Danel, the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Ural, Patricia Kopatchinskaya and the Centre of Contemporary Music of Moscow.

On a professional level, Patrick De Clerck tries to take a position that will guarantee maximum independence. Apart from composing, he publishes his own music (Music Publishing House Dom Gorokhov), and is also one of the driving forces behind the Belgian music label Megadisc Classics. This label focuses both on Belgian composers of contemporary music and on post-soviet music composed by the likes of Ustvolskaya, Silvestrov and Terterian. The atmosphere of De Clerck's own compositions fits in with the latter category. He also did classical music and look and feel for De Handelsbeurs in Ghent and was creative director of Flanders Festival Brussels. From there he advised some concert organisations and is now director of Ars Musica.

For those who read Japanese:
http://www.piano.or.jp/report/04ess/itntl/2009/11/20_9649.html

As a composer, he teaches master classes in contemporary music at the Moscow Conservatoire (Russia, 1995), Antwerp &Tallin (Estonia, 2001 and 2003), Yekaterinenburg (Russia, 2002), Vilnius (Lithuania, 1999, 2002, 2007), Bejing, Nan Ning and Shanghai (2008-2009-2010) and he delivers lectures in Winterthur (Switzerland, 1997), Juilliard School of Music (New York, 2001). and at the Goldsmiths College in London (2002).

for those who read Chinese:
http://musicology.cn/lectures/composition/200910/5635.html