The seven clarinet recital

Yesterday, I went to Strasburg and had a coffee with Armand Angster, my former clarinet teacher. He is an expert at many clarinets, including bass and contrabass. The first instrument I learnt with him, after Bb clarinet, was the basset-horn, to play a Pascal Dusapin work during Festival Musica in 2000.

Last year, I put together a recital program both artistically engaging and pedagogically interesting. I played it twice:

  - Bayridge Residence and Cultural Center, Boston, February 24th, 2007
  - Harvard University Hall, Cambridge, March 1st, 2007

Program

• Suite / Ed, Armand Angster - bass clarinet
• Petite Fleur, Sydney Bechet (1897-1959) - Bb clarinet
• Sieben Lieder der Tage, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) - basset-horn
• Episodes, Gunther Schuller (1925-) - Bb clarinet
• Clarinet Quintet - Larghetto, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) - A clarinet
• Lina, Jean-François Charles - contrabass clarinet
• God bless the child, Billie Holiday (1915-1959) and Arthur Herzog Jr. (?-1983), arr. Eric Dolphy (1928-1964) - bass clarinet
• Improvisation - electronic wind instrument (Yamaha WX5 + VL70-m synthesizer)
• Aulodie, François-Bernard Mâche (1935-) - piccolo Eb clarinet

On this picture (Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office), you can see the seven clarinets (see also this article in the Harvard Gazette).

Keep in touch with Armand Angster and his Ensemble Accroche Note. They have plenty of concerts coming.

Ballade for clarinetist dancer - Video

Do you remember of the announce of the Dancers' Dozen show? Here is the video of Ballade:

Ballade is one of the "12 Études for Clarinetist Dancer." As written in my original plan, the piece includes several references:

• First, the form of the piece is modeled after the classical verse form ballade. It is therefore made of 3 eight-line stanzas and a final envoi.
• The opening clarinet phrase could be heard (and analyzed) as a variation on the solo overtures of Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”, and Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
• Similarly to the music, the choreography makes use of three sources of inspiration. During the first part ("stanza"), the dance builds upon movements from Nijinsky’s Prélude à l’après- midi d’un faune.
• In the second part, music and movement become more earthy. The dance is developed mainly after a cell from Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring.
• In the third part, I use gestures referencing François Villon’s Ballade des Pendus. I chose eight lines from the third stanza:

La pluie nous a lessivés et lavés
Et le soleil nous a séchés et noircis;
Pies, corbeaux nous ont creusé les yeux,
Et arraché la barbe et les sourcils.
Jamais un seul instant nous ne sommes assis;
De ci de là, selon que le vent tourne,
Il ne cesse de nous ballotter à son gré,
Plus becquétés d'oiseaux que dés à coudre.
Ne soyez donc de notre confrérie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absouldre!

Read here an English translation and here the original version in Old French.

Manuscript

Here are the three pages of the score (including music and dance), on which I have worked since the beginning of the project. You can read several layers of comments and modifications reflecting the evolution of the work through time.

The most drastic modifications, made during the last few days before the premiere, are not written, though. I say drastic, because I reshaped the end of the work (thanks to the teachers Elizabeth Bergmann and Joshua Legg for the piece of advice...) These final changes are only memorized in my body and mind... and now on video.

Page 1, "Le Faune"	Page 2, "Le Sacre"	Page 3, "Ballade des Pendus"

12 Études for clarinetist dancer

One of my on-going projects has been the composition of “12 Études for clarinetist dancer.” In the tradition of musical studies designed for the musician to improve his/her skills in a precise domain, each piece will actualize a different approach in terms of:

• musical composition technique
• choreographic style
• relation between music and dance
• proportion of written and improvised elements
• notation

Here is the (provisional) May 2007 version of my plan for these 12 studies:

I cleaned-up this plan to include it in my final presentation for a course I took in the Spring of 2007:

Music and Movement

Tomie Hahn is a singular artist. I quote the bio on her sweet website:

Tomie Hahn is a performer and ethnologist whose activities span a wide range of topics including: Japanese traditional performing arts, Monster Truck rallies, issues of identity and creative expression of multiracial individuals, and relationships of technology and culture; interactive dance/movement performance; and gestural control and extended human/computer interface in the performing arts.

In the Spring of 2007, she was a visiting professor at Harvard University and I took her course "Performing Body, Media, Identity". The course was very engaging, and the group of students was great. We were an active ensemble of undergrad and grad students, from anthropologists to ethnomusicologists, with a composer.

The best point was the unique blend of scholarly research and performance that Tomie managed to make an integrate part of the class. From assignments to the final project, both traditional scholar work and embodied performance-based presentations were expected. That has been the basis for lively and enriching exchanges between all the students.

Tomie took the picture above during my final presentation. I was performing a preview of the study Weight.

Check out her recent book: Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance.

During the class, I wrote a paper on existing compositions for dancing musicians. Have you ever heard of dancing musicians, singing dancers, or dancers playing instruments while dancing, in any area and cultural context? Leave a comment, I would love to discuss about it!

Next week, I will bring to you the video of Ballade, an étude that I performed for the first time in May 2008.

11-13/60 - Play Along 1, 2, 3 - Clarinet Duets

Lionel Liebe was a clarinet student of mine, and I am doubly thrilled that he took part to the 60/60 interactive composition project. Thank you Lionel for your participation, and the really active part you played in this project. Thanks for the three presents, for the discussion, and for the music you made me discover!

Premiere Concert

Petra Stump and Heinz-Peter Linshalm will perform an amazing concert on June 13th, 2008 in Vienna. The event is entitled Short Cuts, and will feature short works by 27 living composers!

I am honored that these two amazing clarinetists gave me the opportunity to take part to this project, and so glad that they will perform these duets. Remember, we played together in Karlheinz Stockhausen's Rechter Augenbrauentanz, his own excerpt/arrangement of Samstag aus Licht.

Clarinet duets for teacher and student

Play Along 1, 2, and 3 are three pedagogical pieces. After the premiere, I will make the parts available, so that clarinet teachers can use them freely.

In Play Along 1, the student learns to play with the mouthpiece only, and later to sing and play at the same time. Development of embouchure and ear.

Play Along 2 introduces quarter-tones and contrast between fast straight 8th notes and slow swung ones.

Play Along 3 must be played with much energy, much sound, much rhythmical precision, and much pleasure. "Estradally" is a reference to the group Estradasphere that Lionel Liebe likes and had me listen to. Check out their Hunger Strike.

Ballade for clarinetist dancer

May has been a great dance season at Harvard.

I invite you to Dancers' Dozen - New dances by 12 student choreographers created in Dramatic Arts 14a, a course taught by Lecturer Elizabeth Bergmann, with Assistant Joshua Legg (meet the Dance Staff).

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 7PM - Free.
Harvard Dance Center - 60 Garden Street - Cambridge, MA

I will perform for the first time my composition Ballade for clarinetist dancer (or dancing clarinetist?), and there will be awesome choreographers and dancers.

In the meantime, have a look at Liz Bergmann's great little book: Connecting to Creativity: Ten Keys to Unlocking Your Creative Potential

More information about Dance at Harvard.

Fulbright Afternoon of Music 2008

This Sunday, March 9th, 2008, at 3 p.m., I will take part in the "Fulbright Afternoon of Music" organized by the Massachusetts Chapter of the Fulbright Association and the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Enrichment Program.

I will present my Leblanc contrabass clarinet, perform Lina for contrabass clarinet solo, and play a work-in-progress live version of Saturation.
We will surely end the concert with a jazz improvisation over Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles Mortes), with two great musicians: pianist Cedric Hanriot and violinist Leslie Levi.
The other artists will be June Park (piano), Syeda Masood (voice), Jeff Miles (guitar), and a pianist I will meet tomorrow.

• In 2006, I presented the basset-horn, and performed Backofen and Stockhausen's Seven Songs of the Days (Die Sieben Lieder der Tage, from the cycle Licht). Read the article that a fellow Fulbrighter posted shortly after the concert: Incredible Music.
• In 2007, I was lucky enough to play my composition Nigritella Nigra, for clarinet and string quartet. The string quartet featured Ariadna Rodriguez and Peter Deckers (violins), Sidney Solow (viola), and Blaise Dejardin (cello.)

I have always much enjoyed this fun event. It enables musicians with very diverse levels, origins, and styles to meet together and
make     music     happen.

Fun teaching in Helsinki

In March 2007, I was invited by Andrew Bentley and Sibelius Academy to give a week of lectures and workshops in Helsinki. The topic was live electronics - spectral sound processing with Max/MSP and Jitter. Andrew Bentley is not only a real connoisseur of the developments of electronic music (he was an early actor of the Composers Desktop Project), but also a singular artist: I hope I will be able to let you know more about his art in the future.

I really enjoyed teaching there, and the conditions were ideal:

1. there was a team of 10 students, active and interested.
2. each student worked on a computer with the proper software installed (Max/MSP/Jitter, from Cycling 74.)
3. we met every morning during 3 hours, over 5 days. Every morning, we had time for some new concepts, as well as hands-on patching, or collective thinking about design and other topics.

Gig at the Feeniks Club

Every Thursday night, the Academy's café is turned into a music club. Would that be great if every conservatory organized such a fun pedagogical and social tool! Students and faculty have the opportunity to share music in a not too formal setting, and it's great.

After a group from the education department, who performed original songs in finnish, and before students patching live a Doepfer analog synthesizer, we performed Plex (Andrew Bentley on live electronics and myself on clarinet.) Thanks a lot to Libero Mureddu, who shot the video with his cell phone! (here is Libero's blog.)

Syllabus

Here is the syllabus I sent to the students before my week of teaching:

Max/MSP/Jitter: spectral sound processing, and more.

Sibelius Academy
Helsinki, March 26th-30th, 2007
Jean-François Charles

Day 1

• Overview of the topic and of the content of the week
  This overview could be called “Spectral processing, or having fun with graphics and sound.” It is general enough and may be open to any student or faculty member (not only to the computer music specialists).
• Exchange
  I will show a patch of mine. That would be great to have each student show a patch he is familiar with. Bring your patches! (with scores where applicable)
• Spectral explorations 1
  Sonogram. Fast Fourier Transform.
• Patching session 1
  Sonogram, recording spectral data into Jitter matrices, frame to frame playback.

Day 2

• Spectral explorations 2
  Phase vocoders: Max/MSP version(s) versus Max/MSP/Jitter version(s). Variable-speed playback.
• Jitter
  Matrices, filters, expressions.
• Patching session 2
  Play with pictures. Play with spectrograms.

Day 3

• Spectral explorations 3
  Real-time spectral processing with Max/MSP. Denoiser, amplitude compression, frequency shifting, pitch shifting.
• Concert patches 1
  User Interface. GUI. Score. Presets. Pattrstorage. Concert and rehearsal situations.
• Patching session 3
  Sound file player. Spectral processing.

Day 4

• Spectral explorations 4
  Back to our Max/MSP/Jitter phase vocoder. Blur playback. Transients. Interpolation between sounds. Mosaicing.
• Concert patches 2
  CPU usage. Max/MSP/Jitter threads. Turn on/off processing. Transition between presets.
• Patching session 4
  From a score to a patch.

Day 5

• Spectral explorations 5
  Real-time spectral processing with Max/MSP and Jitter. Real-time Freeze.
• Object-oriented programming
  Max is not object-oriented. Why would we? Do not cross the abstraction barrier.
• Patching session 5
  Freeze and variations.

Further topics

Depending on the time and the level of interest, we will add topics and patching work. Propositions:

• Jitter, OpenGL, Graphical Processing Unit, power usage optimization.
• Working with sensors: overview of solutions. My upcoming augmented clarinet.
• Work on your personal projects.

References

• Max/MSP/Jitter documentation. The software comes with a necessary and useful documentation. The tutorials (example patches plus pdf documents) are the standard path to proficiency with Max, MSP and Jitter.
• The Computer Music Tutorial (Curtis Roads)
• Microsound (Curtis Roads)
• Musimathics, Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Gareth Loy)
• The Design of Everyday Things (Donald Norman)

Working with Karlheinz Stockhausen - The art of performing

Dress rehearsal, August 2003.

As an homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to share with you a text I wrote in 2003, right after working with the composer. Several noteworthy aspects of his work have not been given much importance in the comments after his passing away. One of them is the importance of performance practice in his music. That's one of the memories we musicians will keep after having performed the world première and recorded Rechter Augenbrauentanz (The Dance of the Right Eyebrow).

The musicians

• clarinet and solo Eb clarinet: Michele Marelli
• clarinets: Rumi Sota-Klemm (by the way, Rumi played basset-horn in Montag aus Licht), Antonia Lorenz, Roberta Gottardi, Maja Pawelke, Jean-François Charles
• bass clarinets: Petra Stump and Heinz-Peter Linshalm
• synthesizer: Antonio Pérez Abellán
• percussion: Michael Pattmann
• conductor: Adrian Heger

In the recording studio, August 2003.

Impressions (2003)

Stockhausen is a master in performance practice. Admittedly, he is first and foremost a composer, but he also has a real gift for getting the best out of the interpreters who work with him. His commitment, experience and inner ear make his presence at rehearsals very effective.

Rechter Augenbrauentanz is a composition for two clarinet voices, one bass clarinet voice, percussion, and synthesizer. We premièred the piece with six clarinets, two bass clarinets, percussion, and synthesizer, under Adrian Heger's conducting and Karlheinz Stockhausen's musical direction. For this piece lasting roughly half an hour, the ten days of rehearsals have been well occupied. Indeed, a correct performance of the piece must be played with a high synchronization between the different voices (it is obvious when we play Mozart's Gran Partita, but it is sometimes forgotten in what is called "contemporary classical music"). Moreover, Stockhausen pays much attention to the careful balance between the different voices. The balance between such high note of the first clarinets and such medium note clarinets of the seconds may require extensive testing, correcting, etc.

Like all scores from Stockhausen Verlag, the parts were of very high quality. Because it was a premiere, the composer wanted to check and correct some of the details: a rallentando, a dynamic marking, a pause or a breath were specified so that the music breathes, lives.

And always his interest for performance practice: he asks to play repeated notes repeated "as if we spoke," he emphasized the dance character of the piece ("a dance with ballet shoes, with no boots!") Anyone who has played his music knows that the music of Stockhausen is not reductible to a formula that unfolds. It is also much work closely with interpreters. This was once again the case with Rechter Augenbrauentanz. The good work environment is also important to note (importantly enough thanks to Suzanne Stephens) and we could feel that during the première concert, when each musician gave his best and we all took a real pleasure to play.

During the rehearsals (picture Heinz-Peter Linshalm.)

Nigritella nigra - Black Vanilla Music

A composition for clarinet and string quartet

Nigritella nigra's first part (until 3'50'') consists in a chord which color changes through the use of microtones. This is a musical image of the flower's vanilla scent. The short central passage (until 4'15'') is a deforming mirror. After that comes a distorted retrograde of the first part. The concentration of energy in microtones in the first part is transformed in more extravert gestures in the second part. The flower Nigritella nigra has a strong character!

Avignon - Acanthes

I composed Nigritella nigra in 1998, for my first participation to the contemporary classical music center Centre Acanthes. Sofia Gubaidulina was the guest composer, while Viktor Suslin was responsible for the composition workshop. You are listening to the recording of the final concert, featuring musicians from the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence, conducted by Sylvio Gualda:

• Didier Breuque, clarinet
• Delphine Avcioglu, violin
• Marc Aidignan, violin
• Michel Tiertant, viola
• Alain Avcioglu, violoncello

The Centre Acanthes took place in the beautiful Chartreuse de Villeuneuve-lez-Avignon, and July was very sunny. The concert happened in a medieval church, open on the outside. As you can hear on the recording, the cicadas were enjoying the hot wheather!

My first "classical" composition

As you can see on my 1998 manuscript, I used a very unconventional notation for microtones. Actually, at the time, I didn't even know the word microtone! So, I wrote a minus sign to mean "about 1/6 tone lower than the pitch", and a double minus to mean "about 1/3 tone lower."

A beautiful Nigritella stiriaca, another species of orchid. Thanks to Olivier Gerbaud, who sent me this picture of his after listening to the music. Picture © Olivier Gerbaud.

Morphologic free improv in Boston

Morphology is Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump's new book. It features "Dream poems" and pictures by poet Ruth Lepson, as well as pictures by photographer Walter Crump.

On October 13th, a great evening celebrating the publication of the book took place at Studio Soto, Boston. In the form of a slide talk, Ruth Lepson read poetry and projected images, and Walter Crump, presented new work and work from the book. With Joe Moffett (trumpet), Eric Lane (keyboard and electronics), and Noah Preminger (tenor sax), we played improvised music, interacting with Ruth reading her poetry. Ruth is poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory

Ruth Lepson and me had lunch together two weeks ago: I would like to feature some poems of hers in a new composition. It would be a new piece for flute, electronics, and poetry reading, that I envision for Mario Caroli's coming in Cambridge in May 2008 (see also my previous post about recording Mario Caroli). I will set several poems, in verse (I really like her games with meanings and sonorities of the words) and prose (like the "Dream poems" in Morphology).

EQUATION

MARKS, MARK, MAX, SHARKS, FAX, RELAX        =        SYNTAX

Ruth Lepson.

The book is edited by BlazeVox and is available as a free pdf download on the Morphology page. You can also support artists by buying Ruth Lepson's books on amazon.

Treffpunkt - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Intuitive Music

"Around the Zodiac" has been the first show of the Ensemble New Flore. The all-Stockhausen program was:

• Treffpunkt (double bass and clarinet)
• In Freundschaft (solo clarinet)
• Tierkreis, in a version with Paul Dirmeikis's poem Sirius on this music. The poem is part of SHU, poems on music by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The premiere took place on January 21st, 2001, in "Le Tambourin", the concert hall of ARES, a Music School in Strasbourg, with Franck Cottet-Dumoulin (double bass), myself (Bb clarinet), and Jean-Luc Tartera (actor). Later in 2001 and 2002, we performed the show with the actor Maurice Gabioud in Gaillard, Villeurbanne, and Geneva.

Intuitive Music

The music you are listening to (well, if you hit play on the widget at the top of this page...) is intuitive music. While recording this track, we were inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's Treffpunkt, part of the cycle Aus den sieben Tagen. With Franck, we played this piece without any pre-conceived idea of a form. I remember we agreed on the very first pitch before playing. To play this intuitive music, we didn't rely on our previous experiences of improvisation in other contexts, but rather focused on Stockhausen's text for Treffpunkt, and on our instantaneous listening experience.

Sound engineer François Geneste recorded us directly on DAT, in the chapel of the Sacré-Coeur Middle School, Thonon-les-Bains, on May 12th, 2001. I love Franck's sound on this recording (I mean, when I listen to it on good headphones, not on my tiny laptop's built-in speakers), and François really managed to capture it in a beautiful way. The sound file is the raw recording: no sound processing has been used. Just 2 microphones and press record. Listen to more by Franck on youtube.

Aus den sieben Tagen's score is available from Universal Edition. In Freundschaft and Tierkreis's scores, as well as recordings supervised by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and beautiful Tierkreis music boxes, are available from Stockhausen Verlag.

Other recordings of Aus den sieben Tagen, In Freundschaft, and Tierkreis:

Derives - Film music

During my studies at Strasbourg Conservatory, there was an important interaction between the Conservatory and Festival Musica (and I am sure it is still the case.) I performed in the festival in 2000, 2001 and 2002, to play the music of Pascal Dusapin, Thierry De Mey (a Maximalist! program,) and Javier Torres Maldonado.
In Fall 2003, Ivan Fedele proposed me to take part to an exciting project: a collaboration with film makers around the topic "the building of the new Conservatory." The Cité de la Musique was in construction, and Marie-Claude Ségard, director of the Conservatory, had the idea of this collaborative art work. The result has been "En Chantier", a collection of 16 short films produced by the Festival Musica, the Conservatoire National de Région de Strasbourg, and the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg.

Production

I worked on the short film Dérives, directed and realized by Sophie de Quatrebarbes, Élise Launay and Adeline Meilliez. Early in the process, I decided to avoid recording additional instruments, because of the schedule, and given the fact that there was no budget to pay performers. Finally, the actual steps of the production have been:

• Recording sounds from the construction site with a DAT recorder.
• Making sketches for the music.
• Recording instruments: Eb clarinet, percussion, and ballon scratching. I played all the instruments, and the recording session was one hour long. I used my sketches, and improvised over them.
• Sound design: I used personal spectral tools programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter.
• Editing and syncing to the film, using Apple Soundtrack on my laptop.

The first projection took place on October 29th, 2004 in Strasbourg, Palais des Fêtes.
I learnt a lot through this project, and I look forward to working on other works involving moving pictures. Today, the Cité de la Musique has been built: look at the map, and you may be able to recognize places from the film.

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Rever - dancing musician and singing dancer

In 2004, I had a great time touring with the Ensemble New Flore our show "Spirales", in Strasbourg, Bouxwiller and Geneva. With the dancer and choreograph Alice Gervais-Ragu, we performed my composition "Rêver" for dancing clarinetist and singing dancer.

Working on that piece has been a terrific experience. I look forward to working again with Alice on a new project of hers: a show featuring four artists who have all an appetite for both movement and sound. I say appetite, for the show will be centered around the topic "cook."

Jean-François.