Lyre de Mercure

Founded in 2011, Lyre de Mercure was born from the vision of a music enthusiast determined to create profound and emotional works. By blending tradition and innovation, we have developed a catalog of evocative compositions that transcend time. Our commitment to supporting artists and guiding their artistic development makes us a trusted partner in the music industry. Discover our universe and allow yourself to be swept away by melodies that resonate with clarity and emotion.

Artistic Director

Sherif Dahroug is a Paris-based composer, concert artist, author, art theorist, and founder of Lyre de Mercure — Music, Arts & Innovation. His practice encompasses composition, performance, recording, publishing, artistic research, and theoretical inquiry, with interdisciplinary projects bringing music into dialogue with architecture, philosophy, literature, visual arts, and innovation. Before dedicating himself entirely to music in 2009, he trained and worked as a Naval Architect, an experience that continues to inform his structural, spatial, and architectonic approach to musical creation.

At the Schola Cantorum de Paris, Dahroug was awarded the Diplôme de Concert by unanimous decision, following the Diplôme de Virtuosité, marking the culminating levels of his advanced artistic training. He also holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts (DMA) in Performance, a Master of Music in Composition and Musicology, and a Master of Arts in Chamber Music from the institution’s Haute École de Musique. At the École Normale de Musique de Paris, he earned the Diplôme d’Harmonie et d’Analyse Musicale, while his broader musical formation includes studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He studied with distinguished musicians and pedagogues whose artistic and pedagogical lineages extend through figures including Sergiu Celibidache, Nadia Boulanger, and Olivier Messiaen.

The recipient of more than forty international awards in composition and performance, he has been recognised by competitions and institutions across Europe and the United States, including Vienna, London, Moscow, New York, California, Berlin, and Athens. With more than twenty years of professional concert activity, he has performed extensively throughout Europe, particularly in France, Switzerland, and Italy, appearing in distinguished venues including the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Vienna Musikverein, and the historic Teatro Paganini in Genoa.

Dahroug is a recipient of the Médaille de Platine, the highest distinction of the Société Académique Arts–Sciences–Lettres, awarded under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic in recognition of his contribution to the arts.

Beyond his work as a composer and performer, Dahroug has developed a parallel body of writing as an art theorist and author concerned with the conditions of artistic creation, perception, form, and necessity. His recent book, VICA 23° — Differentiale ex Vicinitate, proposes a theoretical architecture for what he terms an art du créer: an inquiry into the interval preceding the finished work, where relations, proximities, incidences, and differences gradually acquire consequence and become artistic necessity. Conceived as “Fondements pour un art du créer — Ceci n’est pas un manifeste,” the book develops a vocabulary of vicinitas, incidence, differential, medium, co-portance, gravitation, constellation, coalescence, transfiguration, and intensification in order to examine how a work comes to constitute its own internal necessity.

This theoretical research extends concerns already present in his earlier writing, including In Pursuit of a Sonic Architectonics, where musical creation is approached through the interrelation of structure, perception, symbolism, spatial thought, and transcendental inquiry. Drawing in part upon philosophical and symbolic traditions of ancient Egypt, the book explores the possibility of transforming contradiction, tension, and dissonance into coherent artistic form. Across these writings, Dahroug’s theoretical work remains closely connected to his compositional practice: architecture, musical form, colour, proportion, memory, perception, and the behaviour of materials are treated as interconnected dimensions of artistic thought.

His work as composer, performer, author, and theorist thus forms a continuous field of inquiry in which artistic practice and theoretical reflection reciprocally inform one another, from the construction of musical form to broader questions concerning how an artistic possibility acquires necessity, coherence, and expressive force.