Jean-Francois Charles

Tonight, I wish I were in London with my friend Nabil Benabdeljalil to listen to the English Chamber Orchestra performing the UK première of his Adagio for Strings . We studied composition together with maestro Ivan Fedele at the Strasburg Conservatory . During this time, we spent one week together at the Villa Medici, meeting daily with composer Pascal Dusapin - the week when we met composer Davide Ianni . It was a great pleasure to spend time in Roma with Nabil, talking about music, culture, faith religions, and more. If you are not in London tonight, meet Nabil through his Moroccan Symphony (youtube link). Jazzy, Moroccan, classical, in the tradition, witty, this music is brillant! Listen to the beautiful Sacrifice at the end of the Third Movement: a Moroccan Sacre!

On Sunday, I'm playing the bass clarinet in the Ensemble Sable & Ciel. We are performing Giacinto Scelsi 's Kya, featuring soloist Christophe Dravers on clarinet. It's great music, with subtle relations between tuned and detuned intervals. Christophe Dravers plays beautifully, while Marc Schuster conducts with precision & poetry. Mozart and Rota are also on the program:

In July , I was at Ircam to present one of my live electronics environment for composition & improvisation. Here are a couple of design scribbles for the app: I made them in March & April 0f 2015, not on the back of a napkin, but in a convenient pocket notebook. Now, the app's main window looks like this:

This year, the Prisma meeting took place at Ircam from July 5th to 7th. Jacopo Baboni was the main organizer, as usual; Hans Tutschku showed how he uses light live electronics & spatialization in his compositions Still Air 3 for oboe, bass clarinet & electronics, and Shadow of bells for piano & electronics; Orjan Sandred presented his recent compositions, as well as new developments in his contraint programming for computer-aided composition; Johannes Kretz shared his Timbre Tunnel to morph sound in real-time; Michele Tadini gave a new version of his granular synthesis tool the T-Grain ; Invited for the first time, Stéphane Boussuge presented the computer-aided composition tool Opusmodus - to know more about it, check out this article on music radar: Composition meets programming with OpusModus ; Jean Bresson, Jérémie Garcia and Xavier Favory presented computer-aided composition tools (especially a new reactive mode in OpenMusic) and interfaces for the control ...

You are invited to this exhibition organized by the Touanen family in the French Alps near Evian. Johann is a photographer, Anne-Marie creates poetic natural & mechanical boxes, Élise is a graphic artist, Peggy is a collagist, Freddy recounts traditional & original Alpine stories, Suzanne bakes singular chocolate cakes, and I'm not even mentioning all contributing artists! I am taking part with an installation entitled Metallum , and with a multimedia setting of Freddy's books, including Les Mystères de la Montagne . The exhibition is open until Saturday, 7 p.m.

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 :

We had a blast 2 weeks ago with 26 children of the Bellevue ward in Brest. As you can see in the picture, saxophonist Stéphane Sordet was there, as well as artist Henri-Pierre Deroux . It was the first step of a great project envisioned by Philippe Aarri-Blachette, artistic director of Ensemble Sillages : stay tuned, this Improbable Orchestr'A will be back next year!