bio
The improvisational violist and composer loves fruitful dialogues: writing and improvisation, classical and traditional music, concrete music and improvisation.
She founded the Garden Company and the gArdenrecords label. She was awarded the Royaumont Foundation prize as a composer in 2018 and 2024 and is an associate artist at L’Envolée (77). Trained in viola and improvisation, she holds a master’s degree in contemporary history from the Sorbonne.
Her creations are imbued with current societal and environmental issues. The writing process always links improvisation to sound material, always taking the risk of the moment. For the past ten years, she has been developing research on extended techniques and augmented instruments with electronic effects.
In recent years, her work has led her to explore recording and soundtrack composition processes in collaboration with sound engineer and sound designer Céline Grangey. She is interested in the conditions of sound diffusion and processing, and in listening protocols. She continues her research by drawing on field recording and expanding her transdisciplinary collaborations. Increasingly, the creative process and the conditions of its implementation are becoming as important as the work itself and the ways in which it is disseminated.
Since 2016, she has created numerous projects:
THREE DAYS OF FOREST the jazz trio of free songs with Angela Flao vocals and Blanche Lafuente drums, winner Jazzmigration 2018, on poems by English-speaking female authors,
MAD MAPLE mixed electroacoustic and improvisational work with Elodie Pasquier clarinets, Guillaume Magne guitar, Céline Grangey soundtracks,
SIMONE quartet winner Occijazz, with Sophie Bernado bassoon, Tatiana Paris guitar and Marine Flèche, drums,
DUO MORFIN/ ZIAD with Malik Ziad virtuoso composer and multi-instrumentalist, viola, guembri, mandola, their voices mingle and take us with them, questioning our relationship with the world and the invisible.
CHORÈME with Odile Auboin, solo violist with Ensemble Intercontemporain and Céline Grangey, trio for two violas and electronic tape
Séverine Morfin has worked with composer Jacques Rebotier and composed music for dance performances by Joana Schweizer and Antoine Arbeit, as well as for Violaine Schwartz’s play IO 467.
Trained in classical viola and jazz at the Paris Conservatoire, she holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary History from the Sorbonne and a Master’s degree in Musicology.
She plays a hybrid viola created in collaboration with luthier Patrick Charton.
