Jean-Francois Charles

On Saturday, May 2nd, I will be performing the premiere of PPP , a new series of three short studies for dancing clarinetist: Puppet a reflection on puppetry in music and dance Perpetuum mobile remembering a Butoh performance Pipo a clarinet is just a piece of wood Arts First is Harvard's huge annual celebration of the arts. This year, hundreds of students and faculty take part to performances all around the campus, from April 30th to May 3rd. The crazy Performance Fair is taking place on Saturday May 2nd, 1-5 pm in 12 sites around Harvard Yard. I'll be performing on Saturday at 2:30pm in the Dance Festival, in Lowell Hall . If you attend, make sure to stop by and say hello after the performance!

Today April 25th, my friend Megumi Tabuchi is performing my composition Ballade for dancing clarinetist . Megumi Tabuchi is a great clarinet player, and I am thrilled that she chose this piece as part of her musical theater recital. She decided to link the Ballade to "Dance", a text by the composer Georges Aperghis , with whom she has been working a lot. Thank you Megumi! Score For this occasion, I engraved the music. It's still a draft, but compare to the manuscript !

You are invited to the premiere of Aqua Solo , taking place on Saturday, April 25th, 2009, 8pm, in Paine Hall, Harvard University. Aqua Solo is a solo for double bass written after my double bass concerto Aqua . I have been working for several weeks with the soloist Alex Tarbert , a complete bass player and very sensitive musician. He sounds great on both arco and pizzicato, and I'm sure the performance will be stunning. Three excerpts of my manuscript Inspiring bass solos The double bass solos that I listened to when I was composing the concerto included: Maknongan , by Giacinto Scelsi In & Out , by Pascal Dusapin Valentine , by Jacob Druckman Trittico per G.S. , by Brian Ferneyhough The Ozell Tapes: The Official Bootleg , by Marcus Miller I also used the book Les modes de jeu de la contrebasse/Modes of playing the double bass by Jean-Pierre Robert . This great bilingual book comes with 2 CDs and is a reference for composers and performers. You can find it through the

Huseac , the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition, is one of the great resources the Harvard Department of Music offers. I like most the history section of the web site! The Studio Users Group is an informal forum for all the Huseac studio users to meet, share, and learn from each others. Last week, Robin Hodson of Avid/Digidesign/Sibelius was here to demonstrate features of the integration between Pro Tools DAW and Sibelius notation software. The next meetings This Wednesday, April 14th, 2009, from 2 to 4pm, I'm sharing my most recent Max/MSP/Jitter patch. I'll explain not only the patch "under-the-hood", but also the process I followed to get from the idea ("intelligent" or "transient-aware" granulation ) to the working patch. That's the idea. Together, we'll see how to get to the Max patch... Next Wednesday, April 21st, Ean White , technical director of the studio, will explain & demonstrate the use of t

Here is the live recording of Lapalu , a composition for viola and live electronics . Garth Knox, viola - Jean-François Charles, live electronics - Bert Van Herck, sound diffusion. February 14th, 2009, Paine Hall, Harvard University. You can also listen to the track on last.fm . Spectral Sound Processing in Performance Time In this composition, all of the electronic sounds are generated live, processed during the performance out of the viola sounds. The instrument that I developed for this piece is an implementation of many of the graphically-based audio techniques I described in the article " A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP and Jitter ". For instance, you can hear some transient-aware time stretching as soon as 00:28. The live electronics are playing back the first viola arpeggios considerably slower. Details of the vibrato in the initial pizzicato chords become audible. Sonic transformations that used to be done in studio can now be realized dur