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FAISCEAUX-DIFFRACTIONS
Press (English)
________________
WASHINGTON POST
31rst of October 1970
Coolidge Music Festival
By Paul Hume
*
THE EVENING STAR
Saturday, October 31, 1970
Washington, D.C.
NEWS OF MUSIC
The Coolidge Festival Has Promising Start
By Irving Lowens
Star Staff Writer
*
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1970
Chamber Music Festival Bows in Capital With 3 New Works
By Donald Henahan
Special to The New York Times
*
BBC MAGAZINE
January 1974
London
Jean-Claude Eloy
par
Henri-Louis de La Grange
*
REVUE DU DISQUE
(Disc Review)
September 1973
JEAN-CLAUDE ELOY
Faisceaux-Diffractions
Harry Halbreich
*
DIAPASON
(TUNING FORK)
September 1973, # 179 issue
ELOY Jean-Claude
Faisceaux-Diffractions
Didier Alluard
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FAISCEAUX-DIFFRACTIONS
Press (English)
________________________________________________
WASHINGTON POST
31rst of October 1970
Coolidge Music Festival
By Paul Hume
A Beethoven overture opened the 14th Coolidge
Festival of Chamber Music last night at the Library of Congress where
on Sunday Beethoven sonatas will bring the Festival to a close.
But the center of interest in these festivals has always been the new
works commissioned by the library's several foundations inter-ested in
the creation of new music, notably the Coolidge and Koussevitsky Foundations.
Three of these were the focus of last night's program. […]
Last night's opening Bee-thoven was the overture to the music he wrote
for a production of "The Creatures of Prometheus." As the evening's
three new compositions progressed, it seemed for a time that Beethoven
would remain the one Promethean of the concert.
However, with the last of the three, a work entitled "Faisceaux-Diffractions"
by Jean-Claude Eloy of France, it became clear that we were hearing an
extraordinary music that was not merely new, for all its immediate ancestors,
but music that is the product of a keenly inventive musical imagination,
coupled to an ear of unusual perception.
Eloy's music is for 28 instruments divided into three symmetrical orchestras
placed on stage left, center and right. With the exception of two electronic
guitars, organ and harp and an assortment of percussion, the instruments
are all winds, wood and brass. "Faisceaux", a word deriving
from the Latin "fasces" that in recent time became the symbol
of the Fascists, refers to the fixed axes or poles around which Eloy's
work is tonally organized.
It is an extended exploration and exploitation of sonorities balanced
between large, massed sounds that are indefinitely sustained and delicately
traced patterns from the guitars, marimba, celesta, vibraphones and harp.
The guitars, one of them a bass, with notable use of the tremolo bar to
create varying rates of vibration and their wide range of dynamics, achieved
through amplification, are a new sound in these contexts.
Eloy also makes the subtlest use of the multiple possibilities for shifts
in texture and timbre by employing mallets of wood, of felt, hard and
soft, on the various percussion. The organ, too, adds singular weight
and color.
The brass are largely muted in the work's early stages. But as it progresses
through what eventually appears as one long crescendo, they speak in open
voices, leading to a series of huge climaxes in tone. Eloy is less concerned
in this music with the passing of measured time than in the filling of
time and space with sound. He has an original voice in an area previously
traveled by Ligeti and Isang Yun.
As his aims are different, and his training and background French, so
is his music at once powerful and intensely personal. "Faisceaux"
is more than twice as long as either of the evening's other premieres.
[…]
PAUL HUME
________________________________________________
THE EVENING STAR
Saturday, October 31, 1970
Washington, D.C.
NEWS OF MUSIC
The Coolidge Festival Has Promising Start
By Irving Lowens
Star Staff Writer
Chamber orchestra, Arthur Weisberg,
conductor. Soloist; Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano. Coolidge Auditorium,
Library of Congress. 14th Coolidge Festival of Chamber Music. Program
1: Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, Beethoven ; Sicut Umbra,
for mezzo-soprano and 12 instruments (1st performance), Dallapiccola;
Floreal, for chamber orchestra (1st performance), Kelemen; Faisceaux-Diffractions,
for chamber Orchestra (1st performance), Eloy; Excerpts, The Creatures
of Prometheus, Op. 43. Nos. 15-16, Beethoven.The 14th Coolidge Festival
of Chamber Music got off to a promising start last night in the Library
of Congress. This important musical event attracts in-ternational attention,
and yesterday's invited audience included many out-of-towners. […]
The post-intermission premiere was Jean-Claude Eloy's "Faisceaux-Diffractions"
for an entirely different kind of chamber orchestra than Kelemen's. Eloy
uses no strings, divides his brasses, winds and percussion into three
approximately equal groupings, throws in a pair of electronic basses and
what seemed to be a small electronic organ, and is off to some very strange-sounding
races.
The unfamiliar timbres of the instruments in combination was accentuated
by unfamiliar developmental techniques and bru-tally violent harmonies.
Some of the most fascinating moments in the piece came at the end, with
some exchanges of a single note by the three trumpets against a chaotic
backdrop.
It was ugly stuff, but it had individuality and it did grip the audience.
The volume level, at some points in the score, came very close to the
threshold of pain.
The return to "The Creatures of Prometheus" to end the concert
was oddly effective. After the Eloy had done a thorough job of ear-cleaning,
the Beethoven sounded innocent to the point of naivete, and as bracing
as a glass of ice-water. […]
IRVING LOWENS
________________________________________________
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1970
Chamber Music Festival Bows
In Capital With 3 New Works
By Donald Henahan
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 - […]
The 14th Festival of Chamber Music sponsored by the Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge Foundation, which began last night in the Library of Con-gress,
laid three new works on the table for a first course: Luigi Dallapiccola's
"Sicut Umbra", Milko Kelemen's "Floreal" and Jean-Claude
Eloy's "Faisceaux-Diffractions."
The selection was intriguing, running as it did from the 66-year-old Mr.
Dallapiccola's classic 12-tone piece to that of the 32-year old Mr. Eloy,
a monumentally static and anti-serial work for 28 instrumentalists including
electric guitar and electric bass. […]
The newest gestures of the night came from Mr. Eloy, a Frenchman who studied
for several years with Pierre Boulez, and who has chosen to go beyond
the serialism that Mr. Boulez regards as music's best hope at present.
But, in fact, in spite or its rejection of rigid serial methods, "Faisceaux-Dif-fractions"
kept its ears bent rather faithfully to older com-posers.
Mr. Eloy placed his 28 musicians, (percussion and winds only, no strings)
into three more or less independent groups, each of which raised its own
armies of sound and sent them out to do battle or make mo-mentary peace
with other forces. The amplified guitar tremolo and vibrato were exploited
to good effect and so were various methods of sound distortion used in
popular music.
What movement there was in the piece […] came through the continual
building up and sudden releasing of harmonic and dynamic tensions and
by the contrast of great chordal conglomerates with the connecting tendrils
of relatively uncomplex tone. In all this, one could only think of the
static, granitic works of Edgar Varese and such followers as Ralph Shapey,
who was doing this sort of thing 15 years ago at least.
What did sound significantly up to date about Mr. Eloy's 22 minute piece
was its seeming indifference to movement for development of idea, particularly
in its closing minutes […] So many younger composers and other musicians
have been trying for this time-suspending affect, a la Ligeti, Cage or
Stockhausen (or the Beatles's "Hey, Jude") that we are possibly
witnessing a major deflection in the esthetics of western music […]
All the night's new scores, as well as excerpts from Beethoven's "The
Creatures of Prometheus," were conducted by Arthur Weisberg and played
by a group that included his own contemporary chamber players. […]
The new works - all commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation and the Koussevitzky
Foundation - received what appeared to be excellently prepared performances.
[…]
DONALD HENAHAN
________________________________________________
BBC MAGAZINE
January 1974
London
Jean-Claude Eloy
THE BBC SYMPHONY Orchestra are opening
their Round House series on January 21 with a French work, Faisceaux-diffractions
by Eloy. The performance will be the first in England and will be conducted
by Pierre Boulez. Born in 1938 Jean-Claude Eloy is without any doubt one
of the most striking musical personalities of his generation. Although
he had previously been a pupil of Milhaud and Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire,
Eloy's true vocation as a composer dates only from 1961 when he followed
Pierre Boulez's composition course in Basle. Shortly thereafter he wrote
ÉquivaIences for 18 instruments, which was first heard in
1963 at Donaueschingen, then at the Domaine Musical, both with Boulez
conducting. By this time Eloy had already travelled widely and become
acquainted with oriental musical traditions, from which his works have
often drawn their inspiration, sometimes even part of their actual substance.
In Équivalences the long pauses, the immobility are avowedly
a distant echo of Japanese traditional music, while the opposition of
contrasting elements (static-dynamic, continuous-broken) on which the
work is based owes much to the Orient or rather illustrates an occidental
reaction to oriental music.
Likewise Diffractions commissioned by the Library of Congress and
first performed there in 1970 reveals many Eastern influences. A few notes
hold for most of the piece's duration, create a basic "immobility"
(like "background" notes in Indian music) and serve as "terminant
poles" which Eloy compares to oriental modes. In fact the very conception
of the work lies in the opposition of two musical traditions; the faisceaux
(like beams of light) emitted by oriental cultures penetrate the composer's
consciousness and are "diffracted" by obstacles or screens,
ie the occidental polyphonic universe.
Eloy is one of the few composers of today in whose work the Orient plays
such an important role. Even to the layman this is immediately noticeable
in Diffractions, where the melodic "slides" of the electric
guitar imitate the "vocal" techniques characteristic of the
Indian sitar or the Japanese biwa. On a higher level the Western avantgarde
composer's longing for a lost paradise of spontaneous music-making is
another driving force in this work. In Eloy's own words the music is "chromatic,
at the same time as modal", and the sound-masses (the three orchestral
groups) are "distorted by a chromatic ornamentation which is thick,
always varied, mobile and endlessly breaks up, modifies, transforms the
cycle's modal continuity, but never succeeds to destroy it".
Like the young Boulez, Eloy is an explosive and iconoclastic personality.
In 1965 he courageously attacked André Malraux, the minister of
Culture at the time, for his lack of coherent musical policy, for his
total neglect of the problems of musical education and for his choice
of composers to receive Government commissions. Eloy would have nothing
more to do with France as long as such conditions would prevailed.
Consequently, like Boulez some time before, he chose to leave his native
country, but the USA, where he became a professor of Musical Analysis
in Berkeley, California, inflicted far deeper wounds upon his hypersensitive
nature. The brutality he witnessed through student riots in Berkeley developed
within him a deep loathing for physical violence. Here he gained a new
consciousness of the world, which was soon expressed in Faisceaux-diffractions.
Eloy's "declaration of faith", when he returned to France, was
expressed in an article entitled Heritage and Vigilance. It defined
the presentday composer's attitude towards his past, towards the "heritage"
of Webern and Boulez. For Eloy, as for all strong and lucid creators,
the most basic conflicts have proved the most productive. His personal
solution to them is to be a "vigilant heir", not only of Boulez
but also of two different musical universes, East and West.
Both are merged in Kamakala, Eloy's subsequent composition for
three orchestras and three choruses, which was first performed in 1971
in a 40 minute version, but will soon be extended to two hours. Since
then Eloy has been invited to Cologne by Stockhausen, and the result of
his activity at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk is a long electronic piece
named Shanti, which will be premiered at the Royan festival next
March.
A great deal can be expected from Eloy, if only because his aims are high
and because he is never satisfied with himself or his earlier achievements.
Faisceaux-diffractions displays an expressive intensity, a richness
of material and iridescence of sound seldom found in French music since
Debussy. It is undoubtedly one of the most original pieces composed in
France since Le Marteau sans maître, neither "difficult",
nor esoteric, nor even forbiddingly avant-garde. Its apparent spontaneity
makes it easily accessible. Furthermore it may be the most successful
effort to date to achieve a musical synthesis between the Orient and the
Occident.
HENRI-LOUIS DE LA GRANGE
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REVUE DU DISQUE
(Disc Review)
September 1973
JEAN-CLAUDE ELOY (born 1938)
Faisceaux-Diffractions
MICHEL ZBAR (born 1942)
Swingle Novæ
Ars Nova Ensemble, cond. B. de Vinogradov. Swingle Novæ: the
Swingle Singers, J.-M. Gouëlou (soloist), J. Cavallero (double bass),
M. Sabiatini (drums)
Inédits ORTF (ORTF unpublished) 995038
Eloy has always been an uncompromising
man and artist whose work presented here is probably hardly accessible.
Firstly, it requires a new outlook on musical time, that which the discovery
of Eastern music is beginning to make us a little more familiar with.
And then, the sound and expressive tension that unifies this piece requires
a rather unusual degree of participation and commitment on the part of
the listener. One is mesmerized right from the start by this mysterious
sound universe, which owes its special color to the presence of the electric
guitar (played like a Hindu sitar, with portamenti and modulated sounds),
of the harp and wind instruments maintained in the low-pitch registry
especially in the beginning. This highly spellbinding sound magic, whose
Eastern character is also due to a particular conception of sound –
"impure" according to our standards (strings bouncing on the
soundboard, infra-chromatic ornaments, etc.) –, gradually rises to
a much Varèse-like abrupt power whose bursts alternate with nearly
static, dark and mysterious ranges. Later as magical efflorescences arise,
widening the range to treble or shrill pitches, the harrowing continuum
of a discordant pedal feeds the tension. A few sonorities of low-pitch
horns evoke Tibet. It is a closed-up, haunting, dark and tragic universe,
introduced as it is by the perfection of form, composition and sound production,
which one is used to finding in creations by Eloy, a demanding musician.
This large and so impressive page reaches its peak in a fierce and strident
end, magnetized by the high pitch of a trumpet, which, having remained
alone, slowly fades... Boris de Vinogradov and the musicians of the Ars
Nova Ensemble give the best interpretation of this particularly difficult
piece – the best of the four I have heard so far.
The confrontation of Eloy's and Zbar's creations reminded me of Varèse's
reflection, so fair and paradoxical only on the face of it: "Talent
does as it pleases, genius, what it can." Michel Zbar, a brilliant
student of Messiaen's who just turned 30, has got talent to spare. It
would be a shame that it dragged him on the easy commercial mainstream
slope, which Swingle Novæ offers too many traces of. […]
HARRY HALBREICH
________________________________________________
DIAPASON
(TUNING FORK)
September 1973, # 179 issue ELOY Jean-Claude (born 1938)
Faisceaux-Diffractions (1)
ZBAR Michel (born 1942)
Swingle Novæ (2)
The Swingle Singers; J. M. Gouëlou, soloist
J. Cavallero, bass; M. Sabiani, drums (2);
Ars Nova Ens., cond. B. de Vinogradow (1) (2)
Inédits ORTF (ORTF unpublished) (30) 995.038 (36,80 F).
* INTERPRETATION 8
* TECHNICAL QUALITY 7.5
The fascination for current Eastern music
does not at all come from an alleged abandonment of values on which Western
music is supposed to lean forever, but marks the achievement of a historical
advance that revealed itself at the dawn of the century and has not stopped
asserting itself since. That breakaway from the Western circle, that Debussy
already recommended, shows a shift of contemporary music consciousness:
a refusal of the pathetic chatter of a certain type of serial music, a
will to go beyond brief combinatorics to enrich Western music with new
dimensions; the inner life of the musical material; time.
The dangers of such an approach are twofold: the sterile reproduction
of Eastern models (Reich, Riley), and most of all, the constant attempt,
in presence of musical traditions that mask the strictest conventions
under the appearance of the most extreme freedom, to rehabilitate the
ineffable, the mystery in the name of a so-called subversion of Western
rationalism (Stockhausen).
Jean-Claude Eloy's recent music however avoids those two pitfalls. "In
no way do I try to imitate, says Eloy. My goal is not to make such
and such Eastern music again until I get a true copy label! What matters
is to try and capture the deepest core of certain phenomena so as to recreate
them later". That is for instance how "Faisceaux-Diffractions",
composed in 1970, embraces a fundamental approach of Eastern music while
integrating it in an entirely Western polyphonic creation: the fixity
of harmonic fields, set for the whole piece, comes with an ornamentation
whose density gradually rises. All in all, it is about the progressive
enrichment of a preset, unchanging and repetitive material; a truly Eastern
process in its principle, handled here with an organizational mind typical
of the West. Apart from the electric guitar slides alluding to certain
ways of playing plucked string instruments in India, the score never directly
refers to the East in a language point of view. That goes to show his
deep originality; as far as I know, Eloy is the only musician of his generation
to achieve such a powerful synthesis apart from any folklorizing anecdoticism
as from any mystifying esotericism. One can easily make out the reasons
for this success: if Eloy managed to integrate the lesson of the great
Eastern traditions into his thinking without denying his experience, it
is because he, as a composer, lived the conflict between "heritage
and vigilance", between the proper required necessity as witnessed
by the post-Boulez poetics of his early work, and the need to burst the
too narrow range of the Western musical approach, before repetition and
caricature empty it from any content. It is from that organic as well
as dramatic conflict that "Faisceaux-Diffractions" draws the
secret violence, which enlivens it from beginning to end. […]
DIDIER ALLUARD
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