Fabrice Marandola

Fabrice Marandola is an Associate Professor of Percussion and Contemporary Music at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University (Montreal). Previously, he was a professor of percussion at the conservatories of Angers and Grenoble in France, a pedagogy instructor at the Conservatory of Paris, and an invited professor at the Crane School of Music (SUNY-Potsdam, NY). A founding member of Canadian percussion ensemble Sixtrum, he has an active career on the New Music scene, commissioning, performing and recording new works for solo and chamber ensembles. His artistic activities have received numerous distinctions and awards from Conseil Québécois pour la Musique, Académie Charles-Cros and Montreal English Theatre Awards. Notably, he
was the co-designer and musical director of Rythmopolis in 2018, a large-scale
immersive show produced by Sixtrum, which received the Prix Opus award for Event of the Year.

Dividing his time between teaching, performing and research, Fabrice Marandola was appointed Deputy Director – Artistic Research at CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology) from 2009 to 2014, and Director from 2020 to 2024. He holds a First Prize in percussion from the CNSMD in Paris (1997), a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Paris IV-Sorbonne (2003), and he has conducted in-depth field research in Cameroon with the Langues-Musiques-Sociétés Laboratory (CNRS, France).

As Senior Research Chair at Sorbonne-Universités (2015-16), Marandola led a
multidisciplinary research project on Musical Gesture (Geste-Acoustique-Musique). Author of over 30 scientific papers, his current research focuses on the study of the conception, production and perception of instrumental gestures in percussion performance, using 3D Motion Capture and wearable eye-tracking systems.