Jean-Francois Charles

It was a treat to present in October this Scientific Concert with Volkan Orhon (double bass), Dan Moore (percussion), Benjamin Revis (water clock, Rijke tubes, creation of glass instruments), Ryan Clark (geologist, story about Iowa), Matthew Wortel (creation of stone instruments, preparation of thin slices of stones for visuals), Frederick Skiff (presentation), Will Borich (live media creation for Petrasonic, lighting design), and James Edel, who recorded and worked on audio and video. I hope you enjoy these video excerpts: Scientific Concert excerpts on youtube

Tonight, the Nebula Ensemble with guest conductor Kornel Thomas are performing Gentiana , a new composition for trumpet, guitar, percussion, violin and cello. Concert is taking place at 7:30 p.m. at the Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church in Denver. True-digital synth for string instruments I adapted Andrew Bentley 's true-digital synth original design to string instruments: Violinist Arlo Adams and cellist Julia Emery trying out the instruments during yesterday's rehearsal: Program Notes Gentiana evokes characteristics of the alpine flowering plants used to produce herbal medicine or distilled beverages. During the three sections of the composition, Esprit , Vertige , and Racines , the musicians connect traditional techniques to the physical nature of their tools.

On Thursday, June 28, Françoise Kubler and Armand Angster are going to première Nattie's Air , a composition for mezzo-soprano, bass clarinet, and cymbal with live electronics. The cymbal is similar to the instrument I used to perform Absalon Crash during the NIME 2018 conference . The concert is part of a three day festival: Ensemble Accroche Note's Rencontres d'été in Strasbourg, France. A recital for soprano, clarinet, and electronics Here is the program of this exciting concert: Luigi Nono : La Fabbrica Illuminata for soprano and fixed media (1964) Luis Naon : Ultimos Movimientos for soprano, clarinet and electronics (2013) Jean-François Charles: Nattie’s Air for soprano, bass clarinet and electronics (2018) – world première François Bousch : Dualité Miroirs for soprano, clarinet and fixed media (2012) Philippe Manoury : Illud Etiam for soprano, clarinet and electronics (2013)

Absalon Crash is a composition for cymbal & live electronics. I performed the piece during the NIME 2018 opening concert. With composer Alex Christie and Virginia Tech's L2Ork laptop orchestra , we had the pleasure to perform right before Ikue Mori 's 30 minute audio-video set! This piece consists in an interpretation of Mirrored Resonances , the theme of the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) 2018 conference: the sounds build on the natural resonances of the cymbal, which are delayed, transposed, reversed – in a way, mirrored – by the effects pedal. Program notes Absalon Crash, a composition for cymbal and live electronics. Homage to Søren Absalon Larsen . A cymbal is equipped with a piezoelectric sensor and a transducer. They are connected through a custom-built effects pedal to form a feedback network. A performer acts on the system to explore different sonic worlds. The performer shapes the sound by using her/his hands on the cymbal to muffle or suppres...

I'm thrilled to take part in the NIME 2018 conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) next week at Virginia Tech . I'll be presenting a poster paper titled Using the Axoloti Embedded Sound Processing Platform to Foster Experimentation and Creativity . We wrote the paper with students from the New Musical Instruments class I taught in the Fall : musician and computer scientist Andrew Willette and composers Carlos Cotallo Solares and Carlos Toro Tobon. I'll be performing a new piece, as well. More on that later!

Coming up on Friday: New Musical Instruments Concert with special guest Andrew Bentley, Professor of Music Technology at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki University. This will be Concert #10 in the Center for New Music Season . Event takes place at 7:30 p.m. in the Voxman Recital Hall, University of Iowa. Synths-in-Bottles One of the projects the students worked on consisted in building a synth using a glass jar. Here is a preview of the instruments in their October version: Electroclarinet 4 Among the new pieces, we are going to perform my composition Electroclarinet 4 , for Eb clarinet & analog synthesizer. The synthesizer is akin to a non-input mixer, made with guitar pedals. Andrew Bentley will be performing on this instrument. The circuit includes several levels of feedback: Program Metal Choir (collective installation) Electroclarinet 4 (Jean-François Charles) Focus (Andrew Novitskiy) Synths-in-Bottles (collective creation) Songs of Tomorrow (Mauricio Da Silva)...

We just started a new course at the University of Iowa School of Music : MUS:3285 New Musical Instruments: from Design to Performance . The School of Engineering's Electronics Shop laser cut the boxes, made by after vorplus's axoloti enclosure plans . I like the personalized engraving: Here is an excerpt of the syllabus: Registrar's description Acoustic principles of selected traditional instruments (e.g., winds, strings, percussion) as well as principles of electroacoustic sound production (e.g., analog synthesizers, microphones, transducers); students work in teams to build, test, and improve their own musical instrument and experiment with its playing modes; projects may include inharmonic variations upon classical instruments, musical bots, guitar or voice-processing pedals, transducer-driven DIY Gamelans, and more; for composers, performers, engineers, and sound enthusiasts who want to design, build, and/or perform with new musical instruments. Objectives and Go...

Aqua is a composition for solo double bass, aquaphone, clarinet, and live electronics. It is the 5th part of the Arc-en-ciel cycle. It was created by the Ensemble New Flore during our tour "Spirales" in the Fall of 2004, with Jean-Daniel Hégé - double bass, Brenda Ohana - aquaphone, Elsa Biston - live electronics, Amandine Grevoz - stage assistant, and myself - clarinet. Italian première anniversary The first Italian performance took place in Florence exactly 4 years ago, on December 10th, 2004. Time to share a few pictures . Thanks to photographer Eric Cordier! The piece was a joint commission by Montbéliard Music School and Centro Tempo Reale in Florence. I was invited to spend two weeks in the French Institute in Florence in July 2004, where I composed part of the work. Thanks to the Tempo Reale team for playing the live electronics, and to all the great musicians: Giulio Rubino - double bass, Joël Lorcerie - aquaphone, and Véronique Ngo Sach Hien - stage as...

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...