French composer of film music.
Born into a family of musicians, Alexis Maingaud began his musical journey at the age of six by learning to play the violin. From a young age, he listened to the music of greats such as Wagner, Brahms, Khachaturian, Ravel, Debussy, Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns and Dukas, always trying to reproduce what he heard on the family piano.
After several years occupying the different violin desks of the youth orchestra at the National Music School of Aulnay-sous-Bois, he finally chose the piano, which he had already been self-teaching himself for several years.
After studying writing, composition and conducting, he joined Guillaume Connesson's orchestration class at the regional conservatory of La Courneuve-Aubervilliers. In addition to his musical studies, Alexis Maingaud graduated with a Bachelor’s in Musicology (Sorbonne - Paris IV) and a higher education diploma in sound techniques (ESRA Paris). This latter experience enabled him to meet a number of young aspiring directors, for whom he would write his first scores.
He fell in love with cinema at an early age and throughout the 90s spent countless hours in theatres discovering some of the greatest productions of the American entertainment industry. One of his most memorable experiences was the film Dragon Heart, which he saw when he was eight. It was the first time he cried in a movie theater, and that’s when he understood it was in large part thanks to the music, by Randy Edelman.
Almost twenty years later, after scoring over sixty short films, several documentaries and a good few commercials around the world, he composed his first feature-length original soundtrack, for Olivier Wright’s debut film Psi (2017). In 2018, he was hired by British filmmaker Andrew Desmond to write the music for his film The Sonata, featuring Simon Abkarian and Rutger Hauer. For this, he conducted the National Orchestra of Ile-de-France and inaugurated the orchestra's brand-new recording studio.
At the crossroads between classical symphonic art, minimalist compositions, sound experiments and modular synthesis, Alexis Maingaud draws his inspiration above all from cinematic language: movement, sound, light.
