Coming from a family of musicians, Irène Blanc was initiated from an early age to various repertoires: «classical», but also baroque, renaissance and traditional.
She began learning the piano at 5, then the flute at 8. After a specialized schooling in music, turned towards musical practices and theories as well as plastic arts and art history, she began her studies of flute in the Paris region: at the CRR of Paris with Michel Rousseau, soloist at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and at the CRR de Rueil-Malmaison with Philippe Pierlot, soloist at the Orchestre National de France. She also studied with Baudoin Giaux, professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and soloist at the National Orchestra of Belgium, and other great names of the French flute during internships and master classes (Vincent Lucas, Jean-Marc Boissière, Sandrine François, François Lazarevitch, Jean Bregnac, Serge Saitta, Barthold Kuijken…).
Eager to develop creative projects, she turned to contemporary and electroacoustic music, which she studied with flutist François Veilhan. She then deepened this research in a master’s degree in «Creation, Performance and Sound Arts» supervised by Ircam and La Muse en Circuit, and experimented with generative improvisation in the workshops of Alexandros Markeas at the CNSM in Paris.
Irène Blanc collaborates on various projects: with ensembles and collectives (Court-Circuit, MotusLab, Ensemble Aleph, Erreur d’Authentification, Compagnie Beauxchamps…), festivals (D’aujourd’hui à demain, Musiques Éclatées, Field Note Berlin, Lanvellec, Le vent sur l’arbre, Biennale des musiques exploratoires…), composers (Dominique Lemaître, Paul Clouvel, Januibe Tejera, Julien Vincenot, Sebastian Rivas…), research and creation centres (Music, Technology and Innovation laboratory at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, Muse en Circuit, Grame CNCM), and artistic projects (theatrical performance, video, photography, poetry and visual arts).
Passionate about her instrument, she develops her practice in duo programs with electronics, and also through a curriculum of baroque traverso, performed with Valérie Balssa at the CRR of Boulogne-Billancourt and currently pursued in Master’s degree at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, in the class of Anna Besson.
With electronics occupying a prominent place in her projects, she pursues an activity of personal sound creation in which she seeks to forge links between games of transformations and expressiveness of musical language. In this context, she is interested in the world of synthesis and new expressive digital tools, in the idea of developing an intuitive writing nourished by an invested and sensitive interpretation.
Moreover, being very interested in the actuality of the musics of creation, and convinced of the richness of a porosity assumed between the genres and between the traditional and experimental practices, she is resident of the Station Gare des Mines, where she produced for a year the program «La Levée» on the radio Station Station, dedicated to this subject.
Finally, she leads an educational and transmission activity: holder of the State Diploma, she teaches modern flute and traverso at the CRR of Toulon Provence Méditerranée.