Jean-Francois Charles

You are invited this Thursday, February 20, 2020 at the Hancher Cafe, Iowa City, at 5:30 p.m. for Science on Tap The Scientific Concert: New Music Distilled from Geology, Physics, and Chemistry I will present how collaboration with musicians, scientists, and technicians has been at the core of the creative process for the Scientific Concert show premiered on October 27, 2019. I will also demonstrate new musical instruments made of stones and show exclusive making-of videos . I hope to see you there!

These last couple of weeks, I've been setting-up stone instruments for an upcoming composition for double bass and percussion. On this picture, you can see slices of agate, phonolites from Auvergne (France), lava from La Réunion, sand, etc. More to come...

I received a nice surprise last week. Georges , a multimedia artist from Savoie, France, reacted to my post Lithophone - Agate Music , and e-mailed me a remix of my example. Listen to his Agate composition . Also, make sure you visit Georges' blog audiosource (in French), and maybe you will subscribe to his RSS feed. He declares his blog is about sounds, all sounds, the means of making them, recording them, composing with them, transporting them, making music or not with them . Some posts with sounds and stories I like (you need to find the link to listen to the music): Pondicherymix Grive musicienne L'aluphoniste and L'aluphone portique Variation pour sonnette

Sawing Brazing Drilling Laughing And the result is... a new lithophone (after the big one built for Magma ). The sounding stones are made of agate . The "mallets" (picture below) come in two types: hard ( hematite chunks) and soft (orange calcite ). I acquired all the stones last summer at the Harvard Natural History Museum , a few hours before my plane flew from Boston to France. We built the instrument between August 20th and 22nd, 2007. Many thanks to: my father for his invaluable help my mother for the assistance beyond the making of the lithophone Suzanne and Freddy for their incredible reactivity

Magma is a composition for contrabass clarinet, stones, and live electronics. I received the commission in 2003 from Ensemble Accroche Note (France) and the Dresden Centre of Contemporary Music (DZzM, Germany) for the exciting project ExperimentMusikTheater . This concert featured new music ensembles from several European countries. The whole event took place in October 2003, during the 17th "Dresdner Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik", in the freshly rebuilt Hellerau . We spent a week of rehearsals with Armand Angster (clarinets), Françoise Kubler (voice, percussion), Jean-Daniel Hégé (double bass, stones), the dancer Michel Kelemenis, and the two other composers who wrote for the group, Philippe Legoff and Gérard Condé. The "bed and breakfast" was a place for creative discussions, while we ate an excellent rösti in the simple Swiss restaurant close to the concert hall. The score of Magma gathers six classes of sounds: Explosion - Ébullition - Expansion - Érosio...