CONCERT
SATURDAY 19 FEB 2011, 19H
49 NORD 6 EST - FRAC LORRAINE - METZ (57)
Beyond the limits of time
Concert without applause, with Jean-Claude Eloy (composition, performance) & Éric Cordier (assistant)
Gaku-no-Michi, an uninterrupted, continuous piece of music for concrete, electronic sounds, ushers us into stillness and into a loss of awareness of the passage of time. Reclining in darkness, the audience enters another dimension…
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Note given to the listeners for Gaku-no-Michi concert at the Planetarium of Montreal (Canada) in 2006
« This concert takes place without any spoken presentation and without applauses. Concert like Gaku-no-Michi is preceded and followed, in the continuity, by sounds of introduction and prolongation, rather remote, inactive, which create a sound environment, anticipate or pursue the sound action of the work. Gaku-no-Michi ends by a sound of contemplative character, prolonged to the infinity, which can be listened as long as wished. During this sound, the auditors who wish to leave are invited to leave the room at any moment, but kindly avoiding disrupting those who want to listen to this sound for a longer time. The sounds of prolongation will be maintained until the complete emptiness of the hall ».
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Jean-Claude Eloy
(French composer, born in 1938)
He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, where he won first prize for Piano, the ondes Martenot, Chamber music, Counterpoint, and studied composition in Darius Milhaud’s class. He attended summer courses in Darmstadt (Pousseur, Scherchen, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen), and was a student in Pierre Boulez’s Master Class in composition at the Music Academy in Basil (1961–63).
Jean-Claude Eloy’s pieces have been played around the world. They have been conducted by Pierre Boulez, Ernest Bour, Michael Guilen, Bruno Maderna, Diego Masson, Michel Tabachnik, Arthur Weisberg, and others… He lived in the United States (where he was a professor at the University of California, Berkley in the 1960s), in Germany (where he was invited by the WDR studios in Cologne, the Technische Universität in Berlin, and as artist in residence at the Berliner Künstlerprogram), in the Netherlands, Japan (where, among others, he collaborated with NHK and the Japanese National Theatre). He performed his own electro-acoustic works in international festivals (mainly in Europe, but also in Asia, the United States, Canada, and Latin America) as a “sound projectionist,” and interpreted other pieces with the solo interpreters directly involved with his compositions: Fatiam Miranda (vocalist), Yumi Nara (soprano), Michael Ranta (percussionist), Junko Ueda (Shômyô singer and Satsuma-Biwa player), Kôshin Ebihara and Kôjun Arai (singing Buddha monks), Mayumi Miyata (Shô player), and others…
“…A musician possessing extremely wide cultural knowledge and a strong, free spirit, Eloy has developed outside of trends, institutions and schools of composition. His works erode and transcend the barriers between Western and non-Western music. His syntheses of diverse musical traditions disrupt established attitudes by including non-Western instruments and techniques, and by challenging traditional listening habits through extremely large temporal dimensions. In doing so, he has posed and convincingly resolved one of the central problems of the late 20th century, namely how to form a relationship with the ‘other’, not as an object of curiosity, admiration or submission, but as a vitalizing source of creative inspiration.”
Ivanka Stoïanova. Eloy, Jean-Claude. Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online. 6 Jan. 2011
www.oxfordmusiconline.com
Éric Cordier
(born in 1963)
He obtained a DEA in esthetics (music, video, and philosophy) at Université Paris-I in 1994, and a PhD in religious science at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 2002. As an artist, he has studied under Michel Journiac, Costin Miereanu, and Anne-Marie Duguet.
A visual artist and musician (improviser and composer of electro-acoustic music), he has conducted several projects at the border between fine arts and music, creating sound environments and performances. Focused on the body, his performances have adopted the words and the interface of the machine-man (Compilation Shambala “Ramper, c’est voler”). These projects find their extension in the ongoing Cie Pordurière.
As a musician, he plays a singular instrument: the hurdy-gurdy in interaction with electronic processors. His approach to the instrument relies uniquely on free improvisation which, however, does not mean that the music produced necessarily resembles so-called “improvised music.” He gets cold feet when it comes to ephemeral encounters, and prefers long-term experiences by running projects with distinct characteristics. He is less an improviser in the usual sense of the word than a member of various improvisation bands.
He worked as a sound technician for Grame and toured with The Grief, and has been a part of the technical and programming team of the Tramway Festival (Rouen).
