Jean-Francois Charles

Expo' 74 , the second conference organized by Cycling' 74, is taking place in New-York City on October 14-16. The main product developed by the innovative music software company is Max , an environment to create interactive music, art, and much more. I'm looking forward to learning plenty of fun things there, meeting old & new friends, discovering Max 6 , and attending conferences & workshops. Among the community-driven workshops, I'm gonna check out the video-game prototyping in Max , lead by Ben Houge . I'm sure sopme of this knowledge would be helpful to the students in the Master "Multimedia Products & Services" where I teach a few classes. This Expo will be an inspiring event: expect more news about it in the coming months.

Concerto cadenzas may be written or improvised. Today, the performer of a classical concerto often plays standard cadenzas, composed in the style or transcribed from earlier performances. As we are going to see today, there are also more adventurous approaches. Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote cadenzas for Mozart's clarinet concerto & flute concerto No. 1, and for Haydn's trumpet concerto. The recording is available: Stockhausen conducts Haydn & Mozart (with his own cadenzas) . Beethoven improvises for Mozart... (details at the Beethoven Gateway ) For Harvard professor Robert Levin , himself an amazing improviser, a cadenza to a classical concerto is a real one only when it is improvised. And he is a master at re-creating the magic of improvisation within a given style. The new cadenza: modern, composed & improvised, with live electronics, too! The approach pianist Seda Röder took for Beethoven's Emperor concerto inherits from both the composer's and the i...

In the field of computer music, whether developing automatic score following projects is worth the effort is a debated question. While some composers find it absolutely necessary, others have been disappointed with the early results, or question the artistic need, and don't want to consider it. Yesterday at Ircam, Arshia Cont presented the anticipatory score following system Antescofo . The most important in Arshia's approach is that beyond technical considerations, he underlines the importance of the creative act. When you compose music for traditional instruments and live electronics, you should strive to conceive the electronic music at the same time as the written notes . The paradigm of the "instrumental score" separated from the "electronic music instructions" should have disappeared already! Thanks Arshia for your presentation, it's always a pleasure to see you!

I'm thrilled to announce the première tonight of Benedictus , the seventh part of my Arc-en-ciel cycle . I'm even more thrilled because the performance features two unique artists, with whom I profoundly enjoyed working: Isabelle Jost, a great singer and professor. I already worked with her in 2005 for the première of Zygomatic Jean-Marc Larché, the excellent saxophonist who plays notably in the Tarkovsky Quartet (they recorded on ECM: Tarkovsky Quartet's recordings ) Sacred music In the Arc-en-ciel cycle, Benedictus is associated with the color purple, and with the theme of spiritual life. Religion, life & death collide when the latin text meets Baudelaire's poem L'examen de Minuit , from Les Fleurs du Mal . The composition has also been inspired by the French artist Mylène Farmer . Tonight's concert Concert is taking place in Montbéliard, in the Palot concert hall, at 8:30 p.m. The program features many compositions for acoustic instruments and liv...

Last summer, I presented you with the first sketch for a new composition called Benedictus . A few weeks later, the sketch had received a number of updates. You can see additional layers on the most recent version: Well, this composition turns out to be a kind of pop song. The singer is accompanied by an electronic music track which production I just finished, and by a live soprano saxophone. Benedictus will be premiered very soon: stay tuned to get all the details!

I just uploaded a recording of Risorius , a composition for six singers premièred a year ago by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart . Listen or download below: On a post about the related composition Zygomatic , I mentioned other examples of musical laughters. Thanks to the Library of Congress, I must now add to this list a 1906 recording of different laughters , including one during the final musical piece...

Voilà! Photograph by Martha Stewart from the GSAS web site images of commencement 2011 It was a great pleasure to meet many friends in Cambridge last week. Thank you all for your friendship. Thanks for your support during my years as a Ph.D. student! Bénédicte photographed the early procession This Commencement was also a musical event. Tenor Plácido Domingo was made Doctor of Music. Then, hearing that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an opera aficionado, he improvised a little song for her (see embedded video below):