Jean-Francois Charles

I met Steven Schick when I attended the Centre Acanthes in 2000 . Among other pieces, he had performed Bone Alphabet , which Brian Ferneyhough had written for him. Steven Schick was a guest at the University of Iowa in October : he was born in Iowa and got a Bachelor and a Masters at the University. It was a treat to hear him perform Bone Alphabet again, but I also enjoyed a lot hearing two performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus , a wonderfully playful piece. Steven Schick also conducted a beautiful rendering of Varèse's Ionisation , a sensitive piece of percussion chamber music. I had the pleasure of performing with the Center for New Music conducted by David Gompper . The most important piece on the concert was George Lewis 's Soundlines , a piece during which Steven Schick tells the story of a walk he took from San Diego to San Francisco. During the summer, I re-built the live electronics set-up designed by George Lewis; I took care of the live sound perfor...

Mikrophonie I (1964) is a very important composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written for tam-tam and live electronics, to be performed by four percussionists and two musicians at the filters and sound projection. I had the great pleasure to perform the piece with the Ensemble Sillages in 2016. Percussionists were Hélène Colombotti, Maxime Echardour, Laurent Mariusse and Vincent Leterme; Stéphane Sordet and I were playing the filters and sound projection. Here are excerpts from our January 2016 performance of Mikrophonie I: Although a first glance at the score might suggest that the piece is all about experimentation and noise, numerous rehearsals and performances led me to realize that Stockhausen used quite traditional composition techniques. This is especially stunning when you consider the different sections, in which he uses polyphony, accompanied soli, or homorhythmic orchestral tutti. Mikrophonie outdoors After performing the piece in Brest and Paris , we performed outd...

Back online, the version of Treffpunkt ( Meeting Point ) bassist Franck Cottet-Dumoulin and I recorded in 2001. Treffpunkt belongs to the Aus den sieben Tagen series of text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen (see also this page for more information about the cycle). The file I shared in 2007 had disappeared, and I was recently asked to make it available again. Cover from the 1973 Deutsche Grammophon vynile That request came just after we heard Nomi Epstein at the University of Iowa: she is a composer who works a lot with text and alternative musical notation in her own scores. With the a.pe.ri.od.ic ensemble , they gave a great performance of TIME WITH PEOPLE, an experimental opera by Tim Parkinson. Here is another take on intuitive music, where Franck Cottet-Dumoulin plays with pianist Jean-Marie Reboul :

Thanks to Philippe Arrii-Blachette's relentless energy, we are performing (with Ensemble Sillages ) Stockhausen 's Mikrophonie I in Paris this Friday (after our January performance of Mikrophonie I ). I hope you can come hear this music, rarely performed. The concert is taking place at église Saint-Merry , in the Rendez-vous contemporains season. The program features also great music by Jean-Luc Hervé, and Javier Torres Maldonado: Jean-Luc Hervé: Horizons inclinés (Ciacconia) , for violin & acousmatic system Javier Torres Maldonado: Cuarteto de Cuerdas número 2 , for string quartet Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mikrophonie I (1964), for two percussionists, two microphonists, and audio filters We had rehearsals in the church today: the sound is quite warm. It is a pleasure to work with the great team of La Muse en Circuit , our partners for the sound system.

The score for Karlheinz Stockhausen 's Mikrophonie I is beautiful, but not usable for a concert. My own Mikrophonie score is a gift from Stockhausen; I had to cut & paste copies to arrange a performance score with possible page turns: Next rehearsal this afternoon ( first one took place last summer ).

Last week, we had a first meeting with a dream team of musicians for a new performance of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I : Hélène Colombotti , Vincent Leterme , Ève Payeur , Maxime Échardour , and Stéphane Sordet . Philippe Aarri-Blachette asked me to be responsible for the live electronics (I happened to already own the score when Philippe told me about his project). Get your tickets in September: Vibrations concert featuring Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I , on January 5th, 2016 in Brest. If you're interested in Mikrophonie I, a great ressource to learn how to read the score comes from Stockhausen himself :

Yesterday opened the 10th International Biennial for Electroacoustic Music of São Paulo, organized by composer Flo Menezes , the founder of the Studio PANaroma de Música Eletroacústica . Check out below the amazing program, including the projection of Stockhausen's Hymnen in a 52 speaker sound theater! I had the great pleasure to meet Flo Menezes in Kürten, Deutschland, when I attended the Stockhausen courses for the first time. Flo Menezes is as generous as his music; his experience and knowledge is immense, and he is always ready to share with musicians and students. Nova Ars Subtilior Last year, Wolke Verlag published Flo Menezes's new book: Nova Ars Subtilior - Essays zur maximaoistischen Musik . The book includes all of Menezes's Cologne lectures, as well as a conversation with editor Ralph Paland, in German. Menezes wrote other essays in English, about not only maximalist music , but also electroacoustic music, music and politics, Adorno, time in music,...

I just received Gunther Schuller 's memoir A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty . Gunther Schuller is an exceptional musician. I am not going to summarize his biography, since it already takes him more than 600 pages to tell the first 35 years in the book. Here is a short video where he's talking about Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool recording: I have been blessed to meet with Gunther and work for him during my time in Cambridge, MA. He has a great eye for score engraving. His experience as a performer, composer, and conductor taught him that the quality of music engraving has a direct influence on the use of rehearsal time. This is especially important when you are working with a full orchestra, of course. That's why he is almost picky with the placement of expression marks and other such details. When it comes to making parts layout very efficient for rehearsals, Gunther Schuller is very much like Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom I also worked for . Here is an excerpt...

The fourth session of my Electro-chamber music course was dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen 's classic Mantra . This composition for two pianos (with rind modulators, crotales, woodblock, and more) is a beautiful example of new soundscapes unveiled with live electronic music. It reminds as well that the artistic use of live electronic sound processing predates digital technology. Composing for a traditional instrument and live electronics During the class, the students explored crucial moments of the composition. In Mantra , Stockhausen found many great connections between the acoustic properties of the piano and the ring modulation process. For instance, at the top, the first piano's modulator frequency is set at 220Hz, the fundamental frequency of the A3 repeated in the melody ( musical formula , to use Stockhausen's lingo). With this setting, the piano sounds almost natural on the A3 note, and grows stranger and stranger the farther the note is from this central pitc...

Maybe you know already James Ingram, who wrote Michael Jackson's PYT with Quincy Jones. But today, I want to invite you to visit the new web site of another James Ingram , who worked during a long time as Karlheinz Stockhausen's personal engraver. James Ingram enabled Karlheinz Stockhausen to reach the quality of engraving he wanted for his scores. Have a look at some excerpts . I particularly like Michaels Reise um die Erde and Xi for basset-horn (I studied this piece several years ago - the fingerings are given for a Leblanc basset-horn, but it's easy to find ones that work for the Buffet Crampon model). Scores are published by Stockhausen Verlag . Picture by Clive Barda, 1985, retrived from this Unsichtbare Chöre review .

Seda Roeder is a young pianist whose repertoire extends " from Couperin to Stockhausen and music by selected living composers ". She is currently a Teaching Assistant at Harvard Music Department , and a piano instructor at MIT. Helmut Lachenmann and Seda Röder. Picture from Seda Roeder's web site . Make sure you visit! A couple of days ago, she made available live recordings of a performance at the Goethe Institut in Boston on December 5th, 2008. The archive includes Henze's La mano sinistra , Lachenmann's Ein Kinderspiel , and Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX . I just dropped her an e-mail to get the download password. To get the files, rendez-vous on Seda's Download page . Seda Roeder plays Tolga Yayalar Seda premieres In The Temporal Gardens by composer Tolga Yayalar on Saturday April 25th, 8pm, in Paine Hall, Harvard Music Department. Maybe I'll see you there! By the way, Seda recently released a Mozart, Brahms & Berg CD. Listen to her, an...

Rêver is a composition for dancing clarinetist and singing dancer. It is the result of a great collaboration with choreographer and dancer Alice Gervais-Ragu. Enjoy the video (2004, Spirales tour of the Ensemble New Flore ): Karlheinz Stockhausen and Johann Sebastian Bach Rêver is the green piece from the Arc-en-ciel cycle . This pas de deux is of course influenced by the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen . Indeed, performing In Freundschaft was my first contact with a composition for moving musician. As a composer, Stockhausen is unique by the different ways in which he incorporated movement in his work. He asked several dancers to work with him (notably Michèle Noiret and Alain Louafi ), and notated movement in his musical scores. But I really composed Rêver as an homage to Johann Sebastian Bach . The piece is both a "Canon Contrarium Stricte Reversum" and a "Canon Cancrizans". It is a retrograde (or "crab") canon in contrary motion, that references...

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...

In fall 2002, still at Strasbourg Conservatory , I registered at the École nationale de musique du pays de Montbéliard (Montbéliard national music school). Ensemble New Flore had just invested in a new Apple Laptop (a Powerbook G4, 800 MHz, 756 Mo, at the time), and I wanted to learn interactive music with Max/MSP . I chose Montbéliard because of the composition faculty, Hans Tutschku and Jacopo Baboni Schilingi . Each other week, we met there during 2 intense days, with many great students. We were a creative and motivated community of young artists, including, for instance, Lorenzo "Lorbi" Bianchi and Daniele Segre Amar (now members of esc-crew ). Nice music school in Montbéliard , isn't it? My first composition with live electronics Plex is a composition for solo instrument and live electronics . The live electronics may be played either by the soloist, or by a second performer. I performed the premiere on clarinet and live electronics in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switz...

Around the Zodiac was 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 for...