The Belgian avant-garde composer Frederic D’haene (o 1961) calls his own composition technique ‘paradoxophony’. He considers the coexistence of different musical systems (both in technical and cultural terms) as a positive response to the dissolution of a common ground (such as tonal syntax). Rather than building a new musical language from scratch, he searches for elements from all kinds of backgrounds that can work together in a mutually reinforcing way. The essence of his composition technique is the combination of two or more musical worlds in which none takes control over the other. He studied with F. Rzewski, W. Zimmerman, H. Pousseur and V. Globokar. He discovered Gagaku music (traditional court music from Japan) through Tadatoshi Miyagawa and Kanehiko Togi. He worked with the conductors James Wood, Mark Foster, Michael Wendeberg, Kasper de Roo and Robin Engelen, and with Ensemble Modern, Contrechamps, Het Collectief, Quatuor Danel, Champ d’Action, and Geoffrey Madge, Frederic Rzewski, Armand Angster, Jean-Pierre Peuvion, Daan Vandewalle, Marianne Schroeder, Claude Coppens, Wibert Aerts, David Cohen, Wim Konink. His music was performed at deSingel (BE), Ars Musica Festival (BE), Transitfestival (BE), Blackheath Halls (UK), Edmonton New Music Festival (CA), Toronto Music Gallery (CA), Gesellschaft für akustische Lebenshilfe (DE), Studio Ernest-Ansermet, Genève (CH), Watanabe Jun-ichi Bungakukan, Sapporo (JP), Frankfurter Positionen festival (DE).