Press Shanti (English)

SHÂNTI Press (English) ________________ LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR April 8, 1974 Maurice Fleuret * L'EXPRESS April 8 - 14 1974 MUSIC Les sept jours de Royan (The Seven Days of Royan) Sylvie de Nussac * TRIBUNE DE GENEVE April 11, 1974 Le Festival de Royan prend de l'âge (The Royan Festival Is Aging) Christine Tabachnik * FINANTIAL TIMES April 1974 (London) Royan festival Eloy's Shanti by Dominic Gill * LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR Monday April 22, 1974 MUSIC The Magnetic East by Jean-Claude Eloy (An interview conducted by Maurice Fleuret) * LE MONDE March 29, 1974 Music AU FESTIVAL DE ROYAN (AT THE ROYAN FESTIVAL) "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Jacques Lonchampt * OPUS INTERNATIONAL June - July 1974 #51 Issue Music SHÂNTI, by Jean-Claude ELOY (11th Royan Festival) Martine Cadieu * LE QUOTIDIEN DE PARIS Wednesday, November 6, 1974 Preview SHÂNTI by Jean-Claude Eloy "Musique d'engagement" ("Commitment Music") Gérard Mannoni * LE QUOTIDIEN DE PARIS Friday, November 8, 1974 music: review by Gérard Mannoni "SHANTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Les difficiles chemins de la paix (The Hard Roads to Peace) Gérard Mannoni * LE MONDE November 10-11, 1974 ARTS AND SPECTACLES "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Jacques Lonchampt * THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN 4 Février 1975 Berkeley, California (University of California) A Modern Musical Visionary by Gregg E. Gorton * CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Monday April 4, 1977 An unforgettable experience in electronic music Music / Robert C. Marsh * LA PRESSE, MONTREAL FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 1977 MUSIC / REVIEWS "Shânti" by Eloy : cinema for the ear CONTEMPORARY MUSIC SOCIETY OF QUEBEC. by Claude Gingras * ÚLTIMA HORA June 26, 1977 Rio de Janeiro Shanti: Electro-acoustic music in concert Aloysio Reis * O GLOBO July 1, 1977 Rio de Janeiro TODAY IN THE CECILIA MEIRELES HALL "Shanti", peace armed with electronic poetry. Antonio Hernandez * O GLOBO July 3, 1977 Rio de Janeiro LAST NIGHT'S CONCERT “Shanti”, a transcending electronic poem Antonio Hernandez * HARIAN KOMPAS October 14, 1978 Jakarta ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN JAKARTA by Slamet A. Sjukur * SINAR HARAPAN October 1978 Jakarta "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy A Thesis on Space by: Franki Raden (Akademi Musik LPKJ) * KOMPAS October 1978 Jakarta INTERVIEW WITH JEAN CLAUDE ELOY AND SARDONO W. KUSUMO AFTER THE PRESENTATION OF "SHÂNTI" by Franki Raden	SHÂNTI Press (English) ________________________________________________ LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR April 8, 1974 […] At last, what I would simply say of "Shanti", the huge electro-acoustic fresco by Jean-Claude Eloy that I was able to hear again in better conditions, is that it belongs to this earth and sky music, to those songs of an obviousness and depth that restore hope. The fact that a musician, through his unexpected conversion to magnetic tape, although trained in Boulez's instrumental geometry, meets Stockhausen in one strike on such peaks of universal greatness and in such abysses of sound meditation, calls for longer explanations! I will soon question the author, right here. MAURICE FLEURET ________________________________________________ L'EXPRESS April 8 - 14 1974 MUSIC Les sept jours de Royan (The Seven Days of Royan) In the net of the Festival, many empty shells and a few exquisite fish… Two music giants with an encyclopedic brain and an ostrich stomach: here are Harry Halbreich and Paul Beusen, the new music managers (as of last year) of the Royan Festival. Not content with offering some 120 pieces within seven days – a record ! – this year, they proclaim: "Our major difficulty was to regretfully put aside exciting works." […] There is, once daddy Schönberg said, two criteria to a work of art: necessity and intensity. Then, here is obviously one: "Shanti" by Jean-Claude Eloy, which quite stood out of the harvest. A two-hour-and-fifteen-minute long electro-acoustic piece produced in the studio of the Radio of Cologne graciously made available by Stockhausen (his famous "Hymnen" are not far down the road). In the space outlined by four loudspeakers, sumptuously textured electronic sounds evolve and their inner fluctuations stretch the stillness. They drag various concrete material along: slogans uttered by crowds, Eldridge Cleaver's voice, quotes by Shri Aurobindo or Mao Tse-tung, military chants, etc. "Shanti" means "peace" in Sanskrit. But we are here at the antipode of a blissful idealism. In this tormented meditation, the "unrelenting quest for the stillness of conscience" never forgets the side of violence: it is the tension of contraries on every level that gives "Shanti" its power and its reach. Paris will finally be able to hear this unusual piece of work: probably at the Galliera Museum as part of the next Autumn Festival. SYLVIE DE NUSSAC ________________________________________________ TRIBUNE DE GENEVE April 11, 1974 Le Festival de Royan prend de l'âge (The Royan Festival Is Aging) Jean-Claude Eloy, the author of "Shânti", a work imbued with philosophies from India, raised enthusiasm among the public of Royan. Royan – The 11th Festival of contemporary art of Royan is placed under the sign of diversity and abundance. […] A hundred-odd creations, workshops and conferences provided the listener with a fairly large overview of current productions, however with the exception of the old-timers of this type of festival, like Boulez and Stockhausen. Bussotti enjoyed his position as special guest; Alsina and Lenot […] from a first performance review of their first thirty years of existence. A tribute offered to two personalities who passed away this past year, Maderna and Barraqué, as well as to Schoenberg and Ives, an opportunity granted to several young composers were also part of this plentiful program. The Blaska Ballet, the Rome Teatromusica, the "2 e 2 m" Ensemble conducted by Mefano, the Parrenin Quartet and the wonderful Labèque sisters, among others, shared the performance of a score of concerts and recitals. Among the various represented nationalities were two Swiss men, Michel Tabachnik and Klaus Huber […] Eloy's Shânti, which means peace in Sanskrit, was the only work in the festival to stir everyone's enthusiasm. This meditation music for electronic and concrete sounds, slowly developed in the electronic studio of the WDR in Cologne is steeped in the philosophies of India. For two hours and fifteen minutes, Eastern wisdom mingled with reminiscences of violence in the world motivates long electronic improvisations intertwined with slogans in Chinese and quotes by Shrî Aurobindo. Packed in an austere Romanesque abbey, the paralyzed listeners, their back and buttocks cut by the bars of the rudimentary chairs, gradually felt overpowered by a deep state of peace. Sometimes dulled but the intended monotony of the sound speech, sometimes touched in their deepest conscience by the surge of eight loudspeakers, they related to the sound and thus made the most thrilling spiritual journey. Royan 1974 is the second festival organized by Halbreich and Beusen since the eventful departure of Claude Samuel, former Artistic Director, for the festival of La Rochelle. The quarrels between both cities have subsided […] In Royan, something changed. In spite of magnificent fireworks on the beach, the party spirit previously in vogue died down yielding to a serious attitude, to the "organized" spirit. Concerts started on time; the audience, neither young nor old, religiously listened to the music of our century and later calmly talked about it. […] CHRISTINE TABACHNIK ________________________________________________ FINANTIAL TIMES (London) April 1974 Royan festival Eloy's Shanti by Dominic Gill Although most of the familiar faces of the Royan festival (including Olivier Messiaen and his competition) moved after the angry debacle of 1972 a few kilometres north along the French Atlantic coast to another rival seaside festival in La Rochelle and to another time of year, Royan continues to offer its traditional Easter programme of new music under a new director: Harry Halbreich, in the same informal but thoroughly professional way, as it has for 11 years. […] One work alone in a week stuffed with music stood head and shoulders above the rest and made the going worthwhile. That was Shânti, an electronic tape piece of epic proportion and remarkable quality by one of the most interesting young French composers of the post-Boulez generation: Jean-Claude Eloy. Shânti was played about 20 kilometres outside Royan in the church of the 12th-century Abbey of Sablonceaux, a ruined giant set in the flat wineland of the Saintonge […] I first visited Sablonceaux by daylight on a clear spring morning that might have been mistaken for summer […] Ravens slowly circled the one remaining tower of the church, pale stone and red tile picked out in romanesque splendour against the sky. The whole countryside was still bathed in sunlight, birdsong and silence.What a glum prospect it seemed just then, to be returning in a few days to the old familiar kind of concert hall, squat and concrete, by the Thames, with its rows of chubby feather seats, attendants in surly green, its warning gong ! […] Eloy's tape piece was performed for the first time that night in Sablonceaux by candlelight that sent shadows flickering up into the stone darkness of the high vaulted roof above the transept and nave. The setting could not have been more apt. Shânti is a work full of strange shadows too, and flickering lights, bound together in a series of connected arches: a massive format frame some two and a half hours length. In spite of its length and the cold of the church (only somewhat alleviated by gas burners), hearing it was an impressive and moving experience. Shânti was composed in the electronic studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne. It is Eloy first essay in the genre, and not surprisingly bears in certain fundamental respects the unmistakable imprint of Stockhausen. Eloy indeed is quite open about the relationship: it was Stockhausen who helped him make the first difficult steps, advised and criticised when the work was complete. The composer of Shânti clearly knows Hymnen inside out: at one or two points the two pieces even share passages of almost identical timbre and gestures. But the final impression is not of a derivative work: Shânti is remarkable not only for its breadth of vision, command of technique, and subtlety of detail, but also for the way it uses Stockhausen's language to ends that are entirely individual, wholly its own. Most encouraging of all, although Shânti is explicitly an "engaged" and political work, Eloy has not allowed himself to be seduced by the kind of facile politico-artistic schema so often offered these days as camouflage for essentially second rate ideas. The word itself is Sanskrit for "peace". And on four four-track reels, each one a differently characterised "zone", with three stereophonic reels as links, Eloy investigate the word with the grand catholicity of a John Donne: "Toutes me concernent". The Guide to Yoga, by Shri Aurobindo; Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers ; Mao's poems ; military songs; conversations and student slogans - all placed with great care and feeling for sound in their electronic matrix, filtered, modulated, transposed and combined. Some of the most memorable moments are purely electronic: the development of the "sound of meditation" in the third zone, first presented briefly in the first link; a vast subterranean tone that rose from the depths, gradually embracing an ever wider range of pitches until it filled and made tremble the whole lofty acoustic of the building. The final dissolution of conflict was also most beautifully conceived: a glissando to infinity accompanied by rapid feedback pulses ; the end of a cycle, and the start of a new. Special mention should be made of the superb technical quality of the tape: played at very loud gain with no trace of distortion or background hiss : a quality of sound (both in the making and on reproduction) rarely even approached in this country. Germany, France, Holland and Italy have all possessed national or quasi-national electronic studios for years. In Paris, Europe's most exciting electronic venture, the Institute for Musical and Acoustical Research will be opening shortly. In such vital and rapidly growing field, shall we really be left a generation behind ? DOMINIC GILL ________________________________________________ LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR Monday April 22, 1974 MUSIC The Magnetic East by Jean-Claude Eloy (An interview conducted by Maurice Fleuret) "Shânti" ("Peace"), a hundred-and-thirty-five minute piece of "meditation music" for a four-track magnetic tape, was one of the events organized at the 1974 Royan Festival (1). It is the very first electro-acoustic work by Jean-Claude Eloy, a demanding, unsubdued, and passionate 36-year-old creator who used to work with Boulez, taught in California, traveled in India, and each time felt a shock that has marked his music. The experience he just lived at the Cologne studio and that he recounts in this article stands as an example on many accounts. It most of all shows what a composer can expect today from electronic and concrete sounds. My choice of magnetic media was not a conversion but a logical step that was announced long before. To tell the truth, it took me ten years to obtain that tool. I thought things would be easier in America and that I would have more liberty. However, I was promised everything in Berkeley but never saw any of it, and I was left with a few basic manipulations with Charles Boone at Mills College, and with John Chawning at Stanford. On the contrary, the studio at the radio of Cologne, to which Karlheinz Stockhausen invited me, let me stay a dozen times over a year and a half and allowed me to work for about 1,500 hours with technicians and all the available equipment. Yet, I had only come to produce a fifteen-minute piece on magnetic tape, nothing more. But when I arrived I was fanatical with frequency notation and measurement, and I would spend ten times as long measuring as I would spend on producing. Little by little, I had to accept the relativity of those measurements as well as the impossibility of really applying the plans I had abstractly designed. Tons to lift up That was because I understood that a composer becomes an improviser who has to content himself with performing many takes, like during a movie shoot, and then with making his selection from the rushes. The proportions of the piece are not determined from the start but progressively inferred from the nature of the material. Actually, the overall composition only takes shape as the discovery rolls out. However, I was heading towards acoustic complexity without my really becoming aware of it. Each sound required twenty to twenty-five operations. On the electronic circuits, I played all sorts of alternatives, of which I would keep such or such fragment. Pre-mix sessions grew in number and turned into general mix sessions that mobilized all the resources of both studios I worked in. Those mix sessions were all the more hazardous as while layers always remain present in the tightest exchanges within an orchestra, they often play against one another, overlap or cancel one another on a magnetic tape. I had given up on any music sheet, but as I went along, I ended up writing some 2,000 pages of work notes. Every new conquest made me feel like a zone, which I had unconsciously carried in me, was opening up. As such, my creation was progressing towards its goal without my intervention. I was able to satisfy that long-standing need to burst the "small Western sound duration", to find shelter from the avalanche of small swift notes, to avoid nervously prattling and chatting music like in 99% of post-serial productions, never better than through electro-acoustic work, which offers sounds very much present but very difficult to manipulate and where one naturally wishes to dwell on. For instance, in order for the "meditation sound", which I have used many times, to directly create a melody and resonate like a song, I literally had to lift up tons. However, in doing so, I was able to make it deeper to its tiniest components. Indeed, I am fascinated by what springs forth from the sound body itself on the acoustic level alone. Eastern composers taught me that a sound, a unique event, while not neutral, represented a whole musical universe of inexhaustible fertility. As long as one is not led astray from the internal potential of information that it holds, one will find everything that can nourish the duration, captivate the ear and push the limits of lassitude even further. Then, a simple monody will become richer, more interesting than the most complex polyphony as soon as the micro-accidents that it bears are judiciously exploited. The Real Commitment "Shânti" develops many things stemming from my Eastern experience and that I had touched on in "Kâmakalâ" (2), including in its very slow first part, built on repetitive structures. Feedbacks, reinjection loops, which are nowadays common processes in electronic music, allowed me to work slowly and deeply in the very core of the sound, and especially to imperceptibly develop a slogan punctuated until the point of melodic singing, or until the motionless note, and vice versa. Whereas one always guess the tricks used by composers to move from a cry to a song and to instrumental sonorities when it comes to chorus and orchestral pieces, electro-acoustic music is the preferred environment for back and forth movements between the most concrete material and the most abstract musical sound thanks to its even, polished and smooth quality. This process opens a whole new field of musical research and helps make music more eloquent than it ever was in the West, as the progressive transformation of the signifier - that is the meaningful acoustic signal, like speech for instance - implies the transformation of the signified - that is the message. Thanks to this process, thanks to this continuous meaning of the work, every listener wanted to see their own issue in "Shânti", that of nature or that of perception, that of religion or that of social revolution, among many others. As for me, as I no longer believed in social and political commitment through art, as I had reluctantly brought myself to compose on one side and militate on the other side, the very nature of my work naturally led me to ask the listener and myself a certain number of questions overlapping on the subject of time, listening, spirit, body, politics, etc. Without ever compromising music, without giving texts by Mao, Aurobindo or discussions that I sometimes mention more importance than appropriate, I realized that I could put us in a situation of open reflection on a few critical issues. In short, that is what real "social commitment" is all about. An interview conducted by MAURICE FLEURET (1) See "Le Nouvel Observateur", issues #490, April 1 and #491, April 8, 1974. (2) "Kâmakalâ", J.-C. Eloy's previous work for three orchestra and choir ensembles premiered on October 23, 1971, during the Contemporary Music Days of Paris. ________________________________________________ LE MONDE March 29, 1974 Music AU FESTIVAL DE ROYAN (AT THE ROYAN FESTIVAL) "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Royan – After midnight, under the wonderful Romanesque domes of the Abbey of Sablonceaux, some 10 miles from Royan, a music much different from that presented during the day opens the doors to meditation. It indeed seems that the contemplative quest actually led Jean-Claude Eloy towards this music of electronic and concrete sounds similar to Stockhausen's great frescoes (Hymnen), as well as Pierre Henry's and François Bayle's. The disciple of Boulez', the highly gifted young composer of Etudes III and Equivalences has followed an inner rugged road, crossed deserts in France and America, and searched into Hindu for a spiritual climate witnessed by Kamakala in 1971, in a effort to "integrate the Eastern potential in Western music", which first appeared to me as a dangerous syncretist slope. Shanti, on the contrary, freely spurted out as weeks of research and manipulation went by in the electronic studio at the radio of Cologne, a meditation on "the deep peace of the unrelenting quest for the stillness of conscience" through texts by Shri Aurobindo, never separated from a meditation on war, on social class struggles, and on what Shanti may mean to today's Hindu people or in the face of Mao Tse-tung's revolution. Jean-Claude Eloy discovered and brilliantly explained the "power of psychic penetration of electronic sounds" and that "stretching of time made possible through the inner fluctuations of the acoustic body." His work, which lasts close to 2 hours and fifteen minutes, creates for the listener, in his turn, a true spiritual experience. Sounds of amazing richness evolve along cosmic curves of great fullness, the roar of revolted crowds, and Eldridge Cleaver's voice turn into large choir ensembles and become an integral part of the dreamed-of harmony; for thirty minutes a still "meditation sound", punctuated by a few quotes by Aurobindo, fosters a state of concentration or total surrender. Nevertheless, it seems that the piece loses its unity after an hour, upon completion of the first cycle, as the interview with a young female student in Sanskrit introduces the issue of the inner quest in face of the world's overwhelming destitution. Wouldn't it have been better to remain on that question mark? Eloy may overplay the alternation between meditation and violence for a piece that is actually powerfully united before reaching the grand finale where conflicts dissolve into an electronic fresco of prodigious density. However, one will have to listen to this major work one more time. […] JACQUES LONCHAMPT ________________________________________________ OPUS INTERNATIONAL June - July 1974 #51 Issue Music SHÂNTI, by Jean-Claude ELOY (11th Royan Festival) Listening to every side casts new light around you while listening to one side only throws you in the darkness Wai-Tchang Shânti which, three times obsessional, soft and violent in the alliance, must repeat itself until the soul stops moving and the assent to peace is reached, follows the road of every suffering. Today's man – according to Camus who, even in death, is still alive in me – is the one who "suffers in phenomenal masses on the narrow surface of this earth, a man without fire and food and to whom freedom is but a luxury that can wait; and to him it is only about suffering a little more, just as it is for freedom and its witnesses only about disappearing a little more." And there it is: Karlheinz Stockhausen reaches out his hand to Jean-Claude Eloy whose Faisceaux-Diffractions already evoked an agonizing struggle and radiance, whose Kâmakalâ denied time in the abysmal songs of Tibetan monks; the very longing for light in both sides with the bursting of the heart and the harrowing "pain-serenity" tandem – which they deal with, the first one in Stimmung, the other one in Shânti – finally revealed, tied to itself, and merged, as the exulting earth and the cold starry night were that evening in Royan, in the Abbey of Sablonceaux. At the end of the tragedies, the energy and the violence present in our memory open onto a calm state of consciousness suddenly made possible. Shânti is a term which means "peace" in Sanskrit. Jean-Claude Eloy works at the electronic studio of Cologne. He reads Aurobindo, Vincent Bardet, Monod. His idea was to create a "short, abstract and cautious study". Cautious? Those who have listened to Kâmakalâ cannot believe it. Impressed, should one say. Vulnerable. When he works, time stops. It is no surprise to the one who has lived in India and practiced that slow meditative approach. The only one among today's composers, Eloy knows that essential difference: the passionate movement and its counterpart in the same moment; time that one "does not kill", that one "does not conquer" as it happens in the West by overfilling it with emotions, sensations, agitated spells of fever, and sleep inducement. There is not point in inventing calendars, metronomes, in transforming the voluptuous duration into mathematical time, stranger to the deep and intimate drive that is blood-heart-spirit-tide-stars-cycles, all at once. Where Bussotti talks about masks, where Schaeffer talks about acousmatic listening, the awakening East identifies itself to time instead of hammering it, and slides into it: mysterious union, secret. Hence the violently personal space of Eloy, of Shânti. Eastern music, like a luminous wheel, runs a succession of silent moments. In Shânti as in the Rag the musical coloration is surprising as the electro-acoustic work of 2 hours and 15 minutes seems short. Through the simple repetitions over alternating cycles: the first one wide, violent, and filled with everything that Eloy has heard around the world ("I was getting deeper in an exceptional spiritual climate made up of memory and discovery", horrifying military chants, howling crowds, a gaping cathedral, agonizing tortured victims, and the vision of Oradour-sur-Glane in my own memory, after listening), the other ones like a patient conquest, after which any improvisation, in today's amazing material, looks like a face sculpted in a flame... Repetitions until the softest sound is reached, the most humble sound under the domes of the abbey, white as palms cupped upside down for thirst. Life, death, contradictory, united and reconciled in the will to exclude nothing from man's grieving heart, from the fascinated mind, hypnotized, gazing at love like a blind sun. Shânti was produced in the electronic music studio of Cologne, created in 1951 by composer Herbert Eimert, who died in 73. That is where Stockhausen's Gesang der Jüngligen was born. That is where, in the brotherly sharing among technicians, producers and musicians, that that unlimited aspect of music persists, that of the most unsubdued music of our time, of pilot music, the space-steady music to the extent of our thirst. Therefore no free voice disappears denying Camus' ultimate pessimism. MARTINE CADIEU ________________________________________________ LE QUOTIDIEN DE PARIS Wednesday, November 6, 1974 Preview SHÂNTI by Jean-Claude Eloy "Musique d'engagement" ("Commitment Music") As part of the Autumn Festival, "Shânti", an electro-acoustic work by Jean-Claude Eloy, will be presented at the Galliera Museum on November 6, 7 and 8 at 8:30 pm. Born in 1938, Jean-Claude Eloy first was a student of Darius Milhaud's at the National Music Conservatory of Paris. Later, he followed Pierre Boulez' classes in Basel, and carried out a series of visits in Egypt, India, the Middle East, and in the United States where he taught music analysis at the University of Berkeley. From 1962 until 1966, he composed Etude III, Equivalences, Polychronies, and Macles. Upon his return from America in 1969, he created "Faisceaux-Diffractions", commissioned by the Library of Congress and premiered in Washington D.C. in October 1970, and in Paris in May 1971. Then it was the turn of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which commissioned "Kâmakalâ" from him for the days of contemporary music. The title is a Sanskrit term like "Shânti". "Shânti" means "peace". Eloy describes his work like "a fabric of elements that intertwine, oppose and complete one another, by evolving from the most abstract sound to the realistic raw material" and as "the fascination and the hypnosis of an unheard-of sound". Eloy also wrote : "Shânti does not impose such or such aspect of the world. I do not choose Sri Aurobindo for instance "over" Eldridge Cleaver or Mao Tse-tung through the sound masses just like through fragments of texts that find a place in this work; I put them in one another's presence in front of you just as I confront the most differentiated sound forces to one another. All of them concern me." RETRACING STOCKHAUSEN'S STEPS The work is formed of seven magnetic reels allowing a sound continuity of one hour and fifty minutes for the original version, and two hours and fifteen minutes for the extended version. Four four-track reels constitute the four main large zones while three stereophonic reels were designed as rest points that Eloy judged essential for the breathing of the perception. The original conception of the work appeals to zones of our sensitivity that Stockhausen's music especially helped awake. Produced in 1972/73 at the electronic studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, "Shânti" is besides dedicated to the German composer who wrote about the piece: "You have to close your eyes and listen. In my opinion, it is no longer necessary to see anything else… the best thing is to close your eyes and sit, completely relaxed. In this piece, I think the eyes do not need anything…" As for contemporary music as a whole, the technical aspect should not prevent a direct approach to the work. Refusing to analyze "Shânti" beforehand, Jean-Claude Eloy declared: "One must make love to music pieces before talking about them… There will always be enough time later on to analyze them, to explain them in detail… I believe in the power that some music creations have to penetrate and influence the human being, hence their consciousness, hence the world. That is why, to me, "making music" means more and more taking part in and integrating the great mystery of man and the cosmos that surrounds us every second, while celebrating it." GÉRARD MANNONI Galliera Museum ________________________________________________ LE QUOTIDIEN DE PARIS Friday, November 8, 1974 music: review by Gérard Mannoni "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Les difficiles chemins de la paix (The Hard Roads to Peace) To approach a work like "Shânti", one must once again try and clothe the new man. Jean-Claude Eloy's first merit may be this trust in the difficulty of a journey of which he knows every step, but of which most of us even ignore the existence. He tried to make things easier for us the best he could, but without demagogy. First, the setting of the place thrived to provide the listener with appropriate physical conditions. With sound sources located at every angle of the great hall of the Galliera Museum, rugs were laid on the ground to allow the audience to stay in the middle, sitting, lying or assuming the lotus flower position. A few chairs were placed on the side for those who could better meditate providing a certain comfort level. Thus, the difficulty of a presentation, which the absence of instrumentalists always makes crucial in concerts of electronic music, was resolved for the most part; we were supposed to look inside ourselves. For a little over two hours, Eloy tried to make us think about Shânti, Peace. To that effect, he played with our sensitivity, our intelligence too. The first phase of the work sounds the most varied; a learned superposition of sounds of a different nature, of various consistencies, gives an impression of contrasts, depths, and rapidly takes over. The sound matter is in constant mutation, like those images that memory tries to recreate and, which, hardly formed, disappear, move and evolve. The subsequent phases are quite different, more unvarying or more violent. French, Hindu and Chinese quotes give food for thought through their meaning as much as through their plastic. Crowd and troop noises surge and dissolve. Let us not deny that attention drops now and then, and there are a few gaps as we cannot always be sensitive the same way to such conditioning. A few sequences are not patently obvious, and we sometimes make our way in the darkness. However, to the extent that we honestly accept to undertake this approach that Eloy suggests, with its arid and sometimes disheartening aspects, we will admit that "Shânti" belongs to these very rare works, which change us after listening to them. We are not exactly the same before and after. GÉRARD MANNONI ________________________________________________ LE MONDE November 10-11, 1974 ARTS AND SPECTACLES "SHÂNTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy Created at the Sablonceaux abbey, during the last Festival of Royan (le Monde, March 29), Shânti by Jean-Claude Eloy, has been featured this week as well at the Autumn Festival. This great work confirms, after those of Stockhausen, Pierre Henry or Bayle, the absolute originality and emotional charge that electro-acoustic music can portray. "Shânti", is a Sanskrit word signifying "peace". And the work indeed cloaks the listeners in peace, opening them up to contemplation, to release and to calm, and engaging them on a road punctuated by certain phrases from the Guide to yoga by Shri Aurobindo. Sounds of tranquility, mysterious messages, long sustained sounds forming a harmony in space, never excessive movements nor violent rhythms, the purring of motors at unchanging pitches that juxtapose and intertwine, differing in texture, in "tone" and especially in pulsations and slow modifications of intensity. There are many "concrete" sounds as well, particularly voices, such as a speech by Eldridge Cleaver, demonstrations of May 1968, poems by Mao Tse-Tong, childrens’ voices, volleys of shots ringing out, faraway bells, but all enveloped in an electronic cloak, a sound harmony that eschews their original meaning. Anesthesia through music ? One might be tempted to believe so, when carried by this vast structure that offers the same opulence and comfort as dreamy hours spent pleasantly lulled by the purring of an airplane. Yet, in the middle of the work, in the absence of music, the dialog between Eloy and Françoise Delvoye on the meaning of the word " Shânti ", in India and in today’s world, strikes us to the core, with this penetrating conclusion: "Peace pre-supposes a tremendous background of struggle." What is true for humanity undoubtedly holds true for Eloy himself, if one takes into account the impressive emphasis of this work, founded on a variety of materials, themselves "won over to peace". Transposition of a personal journey or more simply the evocation of an inner world. Peace is still shaking from humanity’s conflicts that are harbored within. This is why Shânti, an invitation to peace, is not a hedonistic or demobilizing work, but more like a beacon for focused meditation. "Before as in after speech, writes the composer, behind the sounds, in their margin of silence, at the root of acoustical material, there is always a human presence, a voice, which speaks and opens up, while transcribing and celebrating it, a part of the universe." But where does this unending spiral lead, the spiral that absorbs all in the general disintegration of the extraordinary conclusion ? JACQUES LONCHAMPT ________________________________________________ THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN 4 Février 1975 Berkeley, California (University of California) A Modern Musical Visionary by Gregg E. Gorton The whispered voices of recent history embedded in swirls of sound, a sibylline voice from the void saying "this is what it will be like", aural impressions of a vast nothingness: this is Jean-Claude Eloy's Shânti. It was performed on Saturday night, February 1, at 1750 Arch Street in Berkeley. Eloy sat at a mixing console in the center of the room with a soft light on his face and for two hours and twenty minutes he gave the audience glimpses of "The Peace which Passeth All Understanding" which, roughly, is the meaning of the title. Eloy's is not a peaceful vision. This first work he has composed in the electronic genre presents a broad, often violent tableau. He has constructed it largely of altered concrete sounds, much in the manner of Stockhausen's Hymnen. In fact, Shânti is dedicated to Stockhausen, and it effects an extension of musical ideas which he and others, particularly Xenakis, sought to develop in the 1960's. For some years now, Eloy, who taught at Berkeley in the late '60's but now resides in Paris, has been concerned with the spatial treatment of musical concepts, a theme common to many recent avant-garde compositions, including works of Foss, Penderecki, Nono, Xenakis, and, of course, Stockhausen. From an early work for eighteen instrumentalists, Equivalences (1963 - available on the Everest label), to Faisceaux-Diffractions (1970) and Kâmakalâ (1971) - for three orchestras, five choruses, and five conductors), Eloy has dealt primarily with dialectical oppositions involving harmony, timbre, sonority, and dynamics. These concerns are evident also in Shânti, except that we no longer find harmonic modalities, but rather the depiction of vast non-harmonic fields. The effectiveness of the work for the listener results from the sweeping lines of tape -manipulated sound which move in and out of aural focus in a seemingly random series of tension-releases. Eloy is often concerned, as in Kâmakalâ, with movement in space only, rather than in pitch or in sound-density. He works effortlessly within the quadraphonic medium by skillfully displacing the successive sound clusters from one speaker to the next in a vertiginous flow. Disorientation, a sense of mystery, and finally awe are the results for the listener. Eloy has interlarded his purely musical sounds with voice-sounds. These include political slogans, crowd noises, marching sounds, and narrative descriptions of a vast place of calm free from light and disturbance. Eloy seems to be telling the listener that he is in a space freed of history and worldly concerns. In this sense the work struggles to exist for itself by negating the past. I would conjecture that this represents an extension of Eloy's purely formal concerns in a work such as Equivalences to the realm of content. Finally, Shânti remains in the mind because of its equivocal position both with relation to the present and to the transcendant future which it tries to project. The quasi-mystical attempt to project a future fails of course, but as is so often the case with contemporary art. The logic of the struggle is not lost because it fails to attain an ideal end - it is strengthened all the more for having made the leap to an active reckoning with the problem in the first place. GREGG E. GORTON ________________________________________________ CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Monday April 4, 1977 An unforgettable experience in electronic music Music / Robert C. Marsh "Shânti", an electronic music composition by Jean-Claude Eloy, heard at the Museum of Contemporary Art Saturday with the composer presiding. There were about 75 of us in the darkened room at the Museum of Contemporary Art, surrounded on four sides by large speaker systems driven by massive amplifiers whose illuminated meters and pilot lights seemed to define an arena in which the action took place. Just off center a single small lamp on a large sound-control board dimly lit the face of Jean-Claude Eloy, whose long, sensitive fingers deftly manipulated the controls to clarify balances and produce the sharp direc-tional effects he wished. We were listening to his most celebrated work, "Shânti" (or "Peace"). The average age of the audience was somewhere around 25. Most of the listeners sprawled on the floor on rubber mats. No smoking was permitted, but one character reached into his boot from time to time for a flask. Everyone was intensely quiet. There were no musicians. There never had been. This 21/2 hour composition was on tape, its form fixed once and for all. It must be adjusted to playback conditions in various locations, since, although the sounds do not change, room acoustics do. It was produced in the Electronic Music Studio of Cologne Radio in West Germany. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who put the postwar German avant-garde on the international music map, has called it "the finest electronic composition I have ever heard." That is high praise, enough to arouse initial skepticism. But the praise is well-deserved. "Shânti" is a remarkable work. The 21/2 hours pass quickly, and they are an experience one should not quickly forget. Electronic music operates by a different set of rules than that composed for instruments, and it should be regarded as an alternative form since it can no more replace instrumental music than instrumental music can replace it. But, like all music, it involves the purposeful manipulation of sounds to convey artistic ideas, and in the case of "Shânti" as much as a Beethoven symphony, the force of the work comes from the fact that the manipulation is of a very high order and creates a powerful effect. In this respect, Eloy has managed to achieve in a long work what a great predecessor, Edgard Varese, managed only in shorter terms in his "Poème Electronique" of 19 years ago. Like Varese, Eloy mixes a variety of sound materials, from those of purely electronic origin to the drill routines of a German army unit. Some of the words are supposed to be taken as speech; others, such as the sequences in what I assumed to be Chinese, are apparently to be treated as abstract sound by most listeners. Much of "Shânti" is quiet - the ending is very quiet - but the great climactic episodes to which it builds with the deliberate, methodical quality of a Bruckner symphony sound like rehearsals for Armageddon. But the intensity is never just a matter of sheer decibels. Although the volume level is terrifically high, the color and texture of the sound are just as important here as they are in symphonic music. Eloy commands a much wider, much more imaginative range of sonorities than most electronic composers, and he totally avoids the stereotyped sounds that science-fiction drama and other commercial music enterprises have worn threadbare. Is this the music of the future? It is a music of the future. Indeed, it is a very significant part of the music of the present, despite the small audience and handful who couldn't take more than an hour or so and left early. The museum is to be commended for bringing this event to us. If you had the staying power to go the full course, you were amply rewarded. ROBERT C. MARSH ________________________________________________ LA PRESSE, MONTREAL FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 1977 MUSIC / REVIEWS "Shânti" by Eloy : cinema for the ear CONTEMPORARY MUSIC SOCIETY OF QUEBEC. Special concert last night in Pollack Hall at McGill University. On the program: "Shânti", a 4-track electro-acoustic work (1972-73) by Jean-Claude Eloy by Claude Gingras […] Our week of music has been a thrilling one, including three and even four memorable experiences. After the Art of the Fugue by Bernard Lagacé, the Archduke performed by the Beaux-Arts Trio, and even Elgar’s second Symphony, it was, last night, in an entirely different vein, the immense 4-track electro-acoustic fresco by Jean-Claude Eloy: Shânti, themed on the idea of peace that this Sanskrit word suggests. Today, the Easter rest that Shânti prepared us for will provide an opportunity to better assimilate all that has preceded... This performance was at the initiative of the Contemporary Music Society of Quebec which, exceptionally, programmed it as a special event […] The composer enters through the front of the concert hall, invites the people who are seated at the back to come closer to the center – the strategic center, as the sound will come from all four corners. He then suggests not to applaud at the end, indicating that, in this particular case, "applause is not at all a proper response", that " clapping is a perfectly useless reflex" (he should have begged people to restrain from coughing as well, we realized, these noises at times disturbed the mood to an unspeakable extent !...). Then, the lights are dimmed, the composer seats himself at the controls and the "journey" begins. The first ten minutes are long. Like in certain films, it deliberately starts off slowly. The process recalls multiple electro-acoustic works found here and there on any so-called avant-garde program. However, the composer soon reveals his originality and takes but little time to demonstrate that Shânti is not an ordinary electro-acoustic work ; instead, we find ourselves perhaps in the presence of one of the most important works of its genre since Varèse's Poème électroni-que. The completely willing listener, who is both physically and mentally well-disposed, will remain under the spell of the experience; the idea of leaving his seat will never occur to him. He will remain there, riveted, for exactly 135 minutes, and without intermission ! At the beginning, I wonder, most naturally, how it’s "done". There is a noise of shattering glass, then chirping birds and children’s voices, soldiers marching to the shouts of their sergeant, the intermittent humming of an airplane as if flying above the concert hall, conversational noises also, and even, an hour after the beginning, as if to separate the work into two "parts", a sort of interview with the composer on the meaning of peace. How it’s "done"... No, I realize early on that it isn’t important to understand how it’s done, that, in fact, it’s better not to know, that only the result counts. Purrings and rumblings quickly pile onto each other. At a given point, the sound, extraordinarily beautiful and forceful, comes wafting in from behind, giving the impression that we will soon be engulfed by it. Sounds exist on several levels ; the contrapuntal ebb and flow reminds one of a symphony by Mahler. But peace always returns. One sound situation subdues on one track while another is born on another track. The fact of knowing that it will last 135 minutes, that it is not finished when it seems to finish, influences the listener marvelously, promising him yet more surprises. A kind of drowsiness soon comes over us. A near-sleep. Peace. Body. Soul. The listener, unconsciously, changes position. Heads turn or nestle into the hollow of a chair. In fifteen minutes, the sound-event will take a new turn and the listener will unconsciously again move into another position. I feel somewhat as if I were at the movies. A kind of cinema for the ears. Not that the sounds heard suggest images. This is far from what I mean. There were bird sounds and many people saw birds. They misheard. The composer was certainly not so naïve as to want to suggest birds ! He used these sounds ostensibly as instruments. Stockhausen understood it very well when he wrote about Shânti that "it is no longer necessary to see something". The cinema for the ear that I am describing is a spiritual experience similar to the experience that a Fellini or Godard film offers, experienced as well in a darkened room and among a crowd, yet utterly independent from the image and similarly, independent from music in the traditional sense of the term. At a time when people are still wondering if electro-acoustic music is indeed music, an achievement such as Shânti by Jean-Claude Eloy perhaps provides us with an answer. CLAUDE GINGRAS ________________________________________________ ÚLTIMA HORA June 26, 1977 Rio de Janeiro Aloysio Reis Shanti: Electro-acoustic music in concert This coming July 1 at 6:30 pm, the Rio de Janeiro audience will have a chance to attend the presentation of one of the biggest electro-acoustic music composers. We are talking about Frenchman Jean-Claude Eloy, who will present his work entitled Shanti in the Cecilia Meireles Hall. Stockhausen, the Pope of electro-acoustic music, declared that "Shanti is the most beautiful electronic composition that has ever been created." Jean-Claude Eloy, 38, pursued classical studies at the Paris Conservatory. He studied with Darius Milhaud, and his work Etude III, composed for his final exam, stirred a heated debate among professors. Upon graduation, he set off to Darmstadt, in Germany, to study with Stockhausen and Pousseur, and seized the opportunity to follow composition classes at the Academy of Music in Basel, and on the same occasion became Pierre Boulez' student. Later, after taking part in various music festivals, Eloy taught as professor emeritus at the University of Berkeley in the United States. His most famous pieces are Etudes III, Equivalences, Faisceaux-Diffractions and Kamakala, conducted by maestros such as Pierre Boulez, Ernest Bour, Bruno Maderna and Arthur Weisberg. The promotion is done in Brazil by the Funterj and the Cecilia Meireles Hall. ALOYSIOS REIS ________________________________________________ O GLOBO July 1, 1977 Rio de Janeiro “When polished, an electronic sound grows complex and becomes alive within.” "Masters are important but composers are always self-taught." "I was lucky to be a student of Milhaud's, a liberal professor who would not label people." TODAY IN THE CECILIA MEIRELES HALL "Shanti", peace armed with electronic poetry. Antonio Hernandez - "I am not an electro-acoustic composer. I am a composer in the wide sense of the term", answered Frenchman Jean-Claude Eloy, 37, to a group of scholars of Sao Paulo. He studied in the Paris Conservatory where he won prizes in the Piano, Chamber Music, Counterpoint and Composition categories thanks to the discipline followed in Darius Milhaud's class. In Brazil for the first time, he will be presenting today one of his most recent works at 6:30 pm in the Cecilia Meireles Hall: "Shanti" for four-track magnetic tapes, a two-hour-long continuous work produced in the studios of the radio of Cologne and considered by Karlheinz Stockhausen as the most beautiful composition of the genre. "Shanti" means "peace" in Sanskrit, a concept, which, for the composer, implies "an extraordinary background of struggles". Presented for the first time in 1974 and greeted with enthusiasm by the most pessimistic critics of the evolution of electro-acoustic resources, "Shanti" cost nearly two years of work in Stockhausen's poetic arsenals – the electronic studios located in the neighborhood of the Cologne cathedral, which still bears the stigmas of World War 2. A musician with a strong academic and real-world background, a composer since the age of twelve, a piano virtuoso who, at the age of 18, won the first prize of the Paris Conservatory with Bach, Schumann, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Bartok, Jean-Claude Eloy turned to the electronic universe after a long amorous waiting period and thanks to Stockhausen who reached out his hand and invited him, in 1971, to work in the studio of Cologne. After graduating from the Conservatory and being encouraged by Darius Milhaud himself, one of those open-minded professors who do not label anyone – he commented – Jean-Claude Eloy attended Pierre Boulez' class in Basel. He took part in the big contemporary music festivals in Donaueschingen, Darmstadt and in the "Domaine Musical" series, among the heirs of Boulez, who left France to pursue a career as a conductor in Germany, England and the United States. Boulez himself conducted the world presentation of some of his works like Ernest Bour, Bruno Maderna, Boris Vinogradov and Francis Travis. Why did you give up the piano? - I have always been more interested in composition even as a teenager during my music studies, cultivating the repertory of classic and romantic pieces. At 18, I left the circle of pianists as I felt that they had few opportunities to mature. Really cultured pianists are rare, like Dominique Merlet, to mention a young pianist famous in Rio. The composer whose main goal is to deepen the music - which is not automatically done - has more opportunities than the pianist does. How did you find out about new languages in the Paris Conservatory? - It was extremely difficult. Olivier Messiaen, although a professor at the Conservatory, was virtually forbidden. Fortunately, one of my professors was Darius Milhaud, a liberal in terms of teaching who would not impose any aesthetic direction and would allow you full freedom of choice. I also initially discovered the "Ondes Martenot" (Martenot Waves) by working with Maurice Martenot himself. It did not have anything to do with electronics yet but rather with a traditional melodic instrument offering a broad spectrum of possibilities thanks to the sound continuity, like a sort of voice resonating from within the orchestra. Can you mention the masters who were the most instrumental to your training? - Masters are important without a doubt but composers are always self-taught. When you compose, no professor is important. The composer is the one expressing himself. To me, Milhaud was important at first. At 17, I was mostly influenced by Debussy and Messiaen through their discoveries in terms of rhythm. Reading Messiaen's Technique de mon langage musical (The Technique of my Musical Language) was a revelation to me. At the time in France, nobody knew much of the Viennese, who I finally discovered thanks to René Leibowitz. Later, Boulez was on the rise. During the "Domaine Musical" concerts, I got in touch with a universe that did not exist at the Conservatory. Any conflicts? - It was a crisis for me. Boulez was Messiaen's and Anton Webern's heir. During my first readings of his Second Sonata for piano, I did not understand anything but I felt the consistency, the richness of the language and the synthesis that he showed of Messiaen's rhythmic evolution and of Webern's harmonic evolution. That is when I decided to study in Basel, encouraged by Milhaud himself: "If I were your age, the master declared, I would study with Pierre Boulez." Mefano, Gilbert Amy and other names now famous were part of Boulez' group of students, from whom Jean-Claude Eloy took some distance over the last years: The group lacked a critical mind, he said. They wanted to make a quick name. To do so, the easiest way was to imitate Boulez, even though they were going against the master, who said in a famous article: "Down with disciples!" He did not want to train "little Boulez". His only goal was to feed his students new techniques, new ideas, everything that could stimulate original creations." For me, the "counterweight", the author of "Shanti" went on, "was Stockhausen, after Boulez: full of ideas and extremely generous. Paying heed to his criticism after the first presentation of "Equivalences" in Darmstadt under Boulez' direction, I reworked the piece, the beginning and the end, and I also modified the orchestration a great deal. Weren't you interested in concrete music? - Yes. However, the Groupe de Recherches de la Radiodiffusion (that I could have joined with those recorded sound transformation techniques) was very closed up and had its own teaching ideas, which led them to impose their aesthetics conceptions. In 1965, Eloy accepted the invitation of the University of Berkeley and went to the United States to teach. It was a way to avoid any career and mundane relations, he said. He stayed there until 1967, somewhat disappointed as people were only interested in musicology and as there were many dark aspects. No research. That is when he developed a liking for Eastern classical music, fascinated by its sonority, its timbres, and vocal techniques in Japan and India. He befriended several Hindu musicians who, to him, represented new open-mindedness. Back to the United States in 68, he tried to assimilate, but not imitate, Asian ideas, and wrote various articles – one of them was entitled "Musiques d’Orient : notre univers familier" (Music from the Orient, our familiar world). That is when he bid farewell to post-Boulez music. The following composition was Kamakala, which astonished his former admirers unable to classify the piece in any category, neither serial nor post-serial. After this work, Stockhausen invited Eloy to work in the Electronic Music Studio of Cologne. Weren't such opportunities for the taking in the United States? - Not so much. Over there, synthesizer work is more of a music based on notes. To me, electro-acoustics is a means to reach very complex sound spectra among the most original ones. It is about modeling the sound with undefined frequencies. What is electronic composition work about? - There are "composers" who content themselves with the first play on effects obtained after ten minutes of work. As for me, the process is much more complicated. It is not just an innocent game. It takes me two or three days to set up an electronic circuit, and as much time to learn how to use the newly invented material. Then I spend five to six days weighing the choices. The first obtained result only forms the work material to be stored. I accumulate stacks of material produced by a host of different circuits that are later reworked to a 2nd, 3rd or 4th degree of transformation. There were 20 of them for "Shanti". Those demanding selection criteria come from a classical training. - When polished, Jean-Claude Eloy added, an electronic sound becomes complex, full of accidents, ornaments that give it a life within. Jean-Claude Eloy, author of "Shanti", visiting Brazil, accepted the invitation from the ICBA (Instituto Cultural Brasil Alemanha) and from the Maison de France. ________________________________________________ O GLOBO July 3, 1977 Rio de Janeiro LAST NIGHT'S CONCERT “Shanti”, a transcending electronic poem PROGRAM "Shanti", for four-track magnetic tape, by Jean-Claude Eloy, produced in the Electronic Studio of the Radio of Cologne. All the lights went out but a tiny one, in the middle of the hall, where the composer worked by a sound-control board featuring six inlets and four outlets for the huge loudspeakers scattered between the platform and the hall entrance, carrying, or should we say binding the listeners who had come in relatively great numbers to attend the first presentation of Shanti by Jean-Claude Eloy. In that darkness, the atmosphere reflected the interior, as one can imagine it, of a space ship whose crew just received the pilot's instructions: "You do not need to be initiated into contemporary music, Jean-Claude Eloy said. All you need to do is listen freely, with an open mind, and let the sound carry you." Every watch showed 6:30 pm as the fascinating experience of Shanti ("peace" in Sanskrit) began, starting with electronic pianissimo cicadas gradually increasing like jet impellers changing colors as they drew nearer, accompanied by rest notes of the most varied timbre families, by glissandos covering, from end to end, every possible sound frequency from the deepest to the highest registers. In terms of effects, nothing per se was that new, expect the fact that each sound was amorously processed through technical resources of the first electronic generation, that of 1962, at the Radio of Cologne, cradle of the first classical work of the genre, which Stockhausen's "Gesang der Jünglinge" was. Through a smart and inspired overlap of timbre elements, of rhythm, even of melodic interest in the first part, through those accumulations of information and scarcities of outstanding good taste, with the full potential of quickening of the listener's internal life yielding the sound of a never-ending breath, it was as though we were witnessing a synthesis of the entire music history, not through literal quotes but through some well-defined outlines, true rhythmic or melodic micro-organisms (probably not part of the composer's goal) that were able to carry imagination towards realms of Gregorian chants, of Monteverdi, and of Bach (one could almost see cells from Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue fly away), of the last quartets by Beethoven, of Prophet Bird by Schumann, of Passacaglia of the Fourth Symphony by Brahms, of Symphonic Variations by César Franck, of Les Noces by Stravinsky, of Anton Webern, of Pierre Boulez, Messiaen and Stockhausen. Suddenly, strangled voices started resounding from the choruses of stone and trees. The winds blowing from every galaxy met in the Cecilia Meireles Hall and shook every molecule of Jean-Claude Eloy's listeners to the last one. Again, every effect was nothing new, but the arrangement and organization of the elements, the tension and rest curves, the force of expression, everything was of a transcendental nature in the short history of the electro-acoustic experience, which, except for a few examples signed by Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and a half-dozen masters, was relegated to an illustrative background in radio and television shows, in movies, ballet dances and big pyrotechnics. Shanti fills the total darkness. The show is one of those monsters that we carry into the innermost reaches of our conscience and which, after being finally defeated by our guardian angels, leave us alone. There are ordinary episodes in Shanti such as the description of pictures of war, the commander voices, the choruses of soldier boots and voices, the calls to light, quiet and peace, the bombings, and even a few ordinary rhythmic patterns repeated with hypnotic effects, but no moment can be qualified as uninteresting. Shanti goes by quickly. The listener has the feeling that hardly 15 minutes of their inner life passed by whereas watches reveal that two dark hours were spent in the hall – nonetheless reminding them of centuries even eternities of experiences, like that wheel thrown towards infinity and which, at the end of the piece, is the innocent canon of ascending glissandos subject to a hallucinating crescendo. With this concert, the Brazil-Germany Cultural Institute made us forgive every oversight of the current Rio de Janeiro season. ANTONIO HERNANDEZ ________________________________________________ HARIAN KOMPAS October 14, 1978 Jakarta ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN JAKARTA By Slamet A. Sjukur When the Director of the French Cultural Center of Jakarta, Claude F. Kieffer sent me a letter to tell me about a composer who would like to come to Indonesia, I suddenly understood who he was talking about, and I immediately became aware of the technical difficulties that we were going to face to set up a the musical show of that composer. The composer of interest is none but one of the figures of the end of the 20th century, the dignified successor of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and others of the same generation. Over the past four years, Jean-Claude Eloy (who was born in 1938) offered major shows as part of the festivals of Royan, Paris, Los Angeles, Geneva, London, Montreal, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, etc., especially with Shanti, a work which will be presented later in Jakarta (at the Taman Ismail Marzuki). In the fifties, most of his works, essentially for piano, and his songs accompanied by a piano were intended for a small ensemble of musicians. He has written orchestra compositions since 1962: "Etude-III" and "Equivalences". In 1971, an ambitious piece for three orchestras with three conductors was set up for the first time for the International Music Week Festival of Paris. That work, "Kamakala", had been commissioned by the French Government. It will also be mentioned for instance at his conference on the development of Western music since the end of World War 2. That conference will take place at the Lembaga Pendidikan Kesenian Jakarta - the Jakarta Art Education Institution (affiliated to the TIM) on October 18 in the evening. ELECTRONIC MUSIC – During an electronic show, the acoustic material used does not include music instruments or human beings but recorded sounds. Over the course of the show, Eloy used eight tracks of sound sources consisting of recorders. Those eight sources are received in a sound-control board; they are processed, arranged and sent to four amplifiers. The audience, sitting in the middle, receives sounds resonating from the four corners of the hall. Shanti, which forms the main part of his program during his visit in Jakarta, is a musical work falling in the category of acoustic electronics (not pure electronics as that one only uses sine sounds and electronic engineering). Electro-acoustic music is a product resulting from several creation steps. First, one selects a source of sounds to be copied in mono (not stereo). That sound source does not automatically come from a music instrument – it can come from water drops, the creaking of a door, burning paper, etc. Finally, the copy must be as natural as possible at that stage, with no reverberations, no filters, no modulations, etc. The "vocal cords" of those patched-up assemblies and the parts are transferred on a small reel. Second step: the already separated sound elements must be selected, several are mixed, randomly stacked by playing those reels on recorders (including at least two with playback) and onto a sound-control board; then copied again on another recorder. Then, a minor technical process comes into play to slow down or speed up the sound source or to turn the sound track over so that it goes backwards (for instance, a strike on a gong decreasing in intensity becomes a sound starting very softly and gradually intensifying when the track is reversed), or the dynamic harmony is altered by a filter and a host of tricks come in handy. There are two types of engineering steps that are usually used together. It consists in mixing a random stack (mixing) and an assembly (pasting). Thanks to these processes, the original sounds are completely modified and it is hard to recognize them. 1,500 hours Shanti, which will be presented later at the TIM, was composed between 1972 and 1973 in the electronic music studio of Cologne (Germany); its realization last about 1,500 hours and resulted in a show of less than two hours. Like movie production, you throw away what you do not like. In its final version, Shanti includes two sound sources; four sources are loaded on a four-track recorder with a single control (quadraphonics) and four additional ones on two two-track stereophonic recorders. One can imagine all kinds of combinations with those eight sound sources. A two-sound combination can produce a mix of sounds 1 and 2, a mix of sounds 1 and 3, 1 and 4, up to 1 and 8, or 2 and 3, 2 and 4, etc. with the other sounds. The three-sound combination can yield a mix of sounds 1, 2 et 3, 1, 2 and 4, 1, 3 and 8, etc. A combination of 4, 5, 6, up to 8 sounds, is also possible. The whole production must be "inflated" with four amplifiers, each one of them broadcasting a combination different from others. The audience, sitting in the middle of the Theater Arena, receives the sounds resonating from the four corners of the hall (see photo). All this for what? People may wonder "why listen to music that is just copied"? Because such equipment composed of stand-alone quadraphonic amplifiers as this one is too luxurious for the public who would rather stay at home. Although it is not mandatory, the direct interference with the composer himself as a living being belongs to the musical show, whose real elements are permanent (copied). Such dialectics is not meaningless for a composer like Eloy who knows the traps, which he himself consciously or unconsciously placed. Shanti, meaning "peace" in Sanskrit, is a meditation on one of the doctrines of one of the greatest yogis, Sri Aurobindo. According to Aurobindo, peace does not consist in a quiet and finite existence. Peace is a equilibrium of elements opposing one another and constantly changing. He means that peace is an extraordinary background for all forms of fighting. Musically speaking, what antagonist elements and what kind of peace does one want to reach? Here, peace is a combination of musical sounds, and sounds that are not usually considered as music, such as market sounds, a mason, a punctured tire, etc. Great musicians always show that music is much richer than one thinks. Eloy's music is not limited to a small group of musicians, contemporary music lovers. It also involves studio technicians who must know how to save on the effects of the show. To music lovers who like to know everything that is going on in the area of current music, they will not only have a foretaste of technical products, but they will also witness how important the part of one's conscience is in every encountered possibility. SLAMET A. SJUKUR ________________________________________________ SINAR HARAPAN October 1978 Jakarta "SHANTI" by Jean-Claude Eloy A Thesis on Space By: Franki Raden, Akademi Musik LPKJ A few days before the presentation of "Shanti" at the TIM last October 18, the SINAR HARAPAN published an article by Slamet Abdul Sjukur on Jean-Claude Eloy, a very famous French contemporary composer who was to present the public with his electronic music creation. Slamet, known for his vanguard creations, would not have made himself heard if Shanti had been an ordinary music event. The presentation of Shanti is everything but an ordinary music event. It may well be the first time that an electronic music show takes place with style in front of an Indonesian audience. A Swedish electronic music composer already presented a work at the Akademi Musik LPKJ. However, the show fell short of expectations; that is in terms of the essential instruments for the music to enter into a dialog with the audience through the sounds, as it is the case with Shanti. Therefore, I believe that I should better explain what electronic music is, who Eloy is, and what Shanti is. Usually, the term "electronic music" evokes a stream of electric music instruments such as bass guitars, organs, as well as many other accessories like loudspeakers and amplifiers. That is not entirely true. However, that is not completely wrong either. Electronic music obviously reaches our ears thanks to certain accessories such as amplifiers and loudspeakers, however here there are neither any guitars nor any organs. In electronic music, the source of sounds is a single frequency sound called sine wave. That sine wave is a sound element extremely pure that contains no harmonic spectrum of sounds produced by music instruments. The "instruments" used by a composer who creates a work exist on several tracks, full of sound concepts and inventions, produced in a studio. In the West, an electronic music composition was created for the first time by an American vanguard composer, John Cage. "Imaginary Landscape" was created in 1939, and at the time the system used by Cage was very expensive, not handy, and it lacked flexibility. A few years later, a new genre appeared in France known as "concrete music", which uses many electronic effects but differs from electronic music in that the elements and the sound source it uses are not sine waves, but concrete sounds, taken from nature – such as the roar of thunder, the creaking of a door or the rustling of a piece of paper, etc. These sound elements are processed on tape until they become a system of sounds whose origin is hard to identify. In 1949, Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of concrete music, produced his first work which met with a certain success, "Symphonie pour un homme seul" (Symphony for one man alone). Unlike concrete music, which has rapidly spread after Schaeffer's innovation, electronic music slowly flourished. Apparently, it is due to the difficulty of finding a studio where sounds can be processed and to the length of that process. In 1951, a new electronic music studio was launched in Cologne (Germany) under the patronage of German composer Herbert Eimert. 1956 only saw a few electronic music creations: Eimert, Stockhausen and Krenek experienced a certain success and reached some level of artistic achievement with creations such as "Fünf Stücke" (Eimert), "Gesang der Junglinge" (Stockhausen) and "Spiritus Intelligentiae Sanctus" (Krenek). Today, new electronic music studios are set up in cities like Milan (Italy), Princeton (USA) and Tokyo. It is interesting to monitor the progress of concrete music and electronic music groups who hurl at one another in regards to the design technique they use. Thus, Eloy is the symbol of a young generation basing its technique and design in concrete music creations. Eloy was born near Rouen (France), and started his musical career at the Superior National Conservatory of Music in Paris. Between the age of 18 and 21, he was awarded several prizes in piano, chamber music (1957), counterpoint (1958) and Ondes Martenot (Martenot Waves) (1959). He then studied the art of composition under the direction of a famous 20th century composer, Darius Milhaud. In 1961-1962, he attended the class of a renowned figure of music who was very popular at the time: Pierre Boulez, not only known as a composer but also as a conductor. That is when Eloy created his work "Etude III", presented in Paris as part of the "Domaine Musical" concerts, a 20th century music program organized by Pierre Boulez himself. In 1972, he received an invitation by Stockhausen himself to come and work in the electronic music studio he headed in Cologne. That is where he produced "Shanti" (in less than a year), which he presented yesterday. Then, Eloy traveled America and Asia with Shanti, and his creation was commended by Stockhausen himself. After Shanti's success, Eloy received another invitation, this time from the electronic music studio in Tokyo in 1977, the year he created "Gaku no michi", a four-hour-long electronic music piece. This composition was premiered at the contemporary festival of artistic creation of la Rochelle (France) in 1978 as part of "les Journées Jean-Claude Eloy" (Jean-Claude Eloy's Days) special program, during which Eloy presented his work for an uninterrupted two hours, and took part in conferences and workshops. Finally, Shanti's presentation at the Teater Arena TIM took place last October 18. The equipment used for Shanti includes a four-track 15 i.p.s (quadraphonic) recorder, a two-track 15 i.p.s (stereophonic) recorder, two consoles and four 200W loudspeakers with four simultaneous sources. In the Teater Arena, these accessories were set up as follows: four loudspeakers were placed in the four corners of the hall, and the two consoles in the middle. At 8 pm, Eloy entered the theater ("the Arena") and stood right in front of both consoles. Then, he asked the listeners who were seated as he entered to come closer and sit by him (see our photo) because Shanti, sue to its nature, had to be listened to in that position. At the rehearsal the day before, I was able to tell the difference depending on whether one was seated behind the arena or right in the middle, at the center of the sound movements. To me, if you listen to Shanti from behind the arena, you miss a great part of the unique aesthetic experience it offers. In an absolute silence, a high frequency sound swiftly starts to resonate from the four loudspeakers and to penetrate the space. Eloy is already using his potentiometers, adding a dynamic to the emerging sounds. The high frequency sound is slowly creeping for a few moments. Two loudspeakers in the back suddenly release sounds featuring an elaborated rhythm. Then, the two loudspeakers from the front and the four elements are cranked up. That is when space comes in as an element and attains its peak in the middle of Shanti's journey. At that moment, the idea of space completely enters our conscience, and more importantly, the sound suddenly becomes not an abstraction but a physical creature. The sound becomes a "sculpture" and physically moves, exploring every inch of open space at an accessible frequency. Eloy uses a crescendo to reach an orgasm in terms of volume, and penetrates us with excitement. The sounds is now a weight, and for the first time I feel that the sound is now like a power, that it can force us to let go of our conscience, to shape us like that sound itself. I felt myself become the sound. In that context, Eloy transformed his ideal into a conscience and metamorphosed the sound into magic. Actually, that is nothing extraordinary. Primitive people managed to do it although in a different way. The ability for the sound to carry us into excitement may originate from the natural energy it contains, although Eloy behave as someone moving it. It is more interesting to consider Eloy as a subject, and to see how, at his level, he has reached a virtuosity in the organization of sine waves obtained with an oscillator in order to maximize the potentiality of the material. Let us mention, for instance, his capacity to make the most out of space and to make it active/dynamic with a crescendo-decrescendo pattern on high frequency sounds, or by using other sound forms designed thanks to antipode techniques by capitalizing on the potentiality of the four loudspeakers. It is definitely an extraordinary technical composition, and musical compositions using traditional instruments will never be able to implement it. Apart from the thesis relative to space, which Eloy deals with in his creation, he seems to have managed to discover new outstanding sound qualities with Shanti, thanks to electric circuit compositions created in studio – such as the meditative sound he used before the paroxysm. Eloy managed to place the quality of his sounds according to interesting proportions and was thus able to generate a real meditation atmosphere. Eloy also offered us a no less interesting atmosphere when he used a particular composition of sounds obtained thanks to the engineering of ocean wave sounds. Actually, it consists in a "Schaeffer-style" technique of concrete music, not in a technique of pure electronic music. Now, it is not just about recognizing the implication of ocean waves: it has already been transformed, and has become a sound figure that swings coldly and conveys an extraordinary peace. There's some irony to it: Shanti, which means "peace", a goal pursued by Eloy throughout its creation and underlying design, actually only appears but through a sound. Shanti really is a captivating composition, however not perfect yet. One can see Eloy's weaknesses again in the ideal gestation of Shanti itself. For instance, as the piece reaches its peak, that is during the part he composed for humoristic purposes. For that moment, Eloy uses a German march, whose chant is accompanied by boot sounds of soldiers marching. Eloy does not alter that sound element; he amplifies it using the space, which he fills with the four loudspeakers. The resulted effect is comic, and that is exactly what Eloy was looking for. That episode lasted a few rather long moments with the intention of relaxing our psyche, which was tense a few second before. A fascinating choice on the part of the composer, however which proved Shanti's main weakness. Eloy forgot to take our psyche into consideration, most of all its exhaustion after that magnificent paroxysm a few moments earlier. As a result, as Shanti reaches its highest point, the listener cannot once again keep up. Even more so, Eloy attains a second paroxysm following a very slow process. Thanks to an extremely fascinating technique of slow slides from high to low frequency, the sounds were processed with a technique of canon sounds (very close to one another), and the use of the crescendo. Eloy eventually manages to arouse our psyche once again and to force it to attain a paroxysm a second time. Nevertheless, it is the moment chosen by Eloy to put an end to Shanti, and our feeling is that the paroxysm is timid, being left uncompleted. Shanti was felt as too short a work whose end was engulfed by a huge hole. FRANKI RADEN ________________________________________________ KOMPAS October 1978 Jakarta INTERVIEW WITH JEAN CLAUDE ELOY AND SARDONO W. KUSUMO AFTER THE PRESENTATION OF "SHANTI" By Franki Raden Last October 19, Jean-Claude Eloy, a distinguished composer of contemporary music after the Boulez, Xenakis and Stockhausen generation, came to Indonesia for the premiere of "Shanti", an electronic music composition. Different from the legendary musicians who have been discovered here, in a surprising way, a composer of Eloy's caliber is visiting us for the first time in Indonesia. That is why I wanted to interview Eloy, who came with Sardono W. Kusumo, a renowned choreographer currently focused on his approach of several artistic media. The Psychology of Time F (Franki): What experience have you drawn so far of the process of your creations using elements of electronic music? J (Jean): I have drawn a host of experiences from my music inventions by using elements of electronic music. My discoveries dealing with the specific quality of sounds thanks to the manipulation of sine sounds seem to have influenced my music creations based on traditional instruments. Otherwise, I had a wonderful experience in terms of time psychology. I found out a fascinating sound existence as I worked on Shanti. It included a mix of different sine sounds that I stacked up to make them compact so as to form a sort of cluster, slightly spread out and not as abrupt as a cluster. Let us say that they were more in harmony. At that time, I would only hear the sound without being aware of time passing by. A very long moment. Actually, I did not feel the entirety of that moment. To me, it was a meditative sound. My compositions of electronic music often generate such experiences. Bandung's audience: a "virgin" F: What did you feel when you saw Indonesians listening to your music? J: I gave presentations in two cities, Bandung and Jakarta. I felt a unique and quite interesting impression in these two cities. In Bandung, the audience was still a "virgin", which means that they had never heard that type of music before. Most of the listeners were young people. They had come with a view to listening to popular music, or something else, in any case, music they would like. At the beginning of Shanti, I was surprised because I heard people talk as I had reached a passage that I perform pianissimo. Imagine, there were 1,000 people. When I played fortissimo, the sounds of voices were not important, but they disturbed me a lot during the pianissimo passage. I felt a strange sensation because in the West, if people do not like the music they hear, they leave or become aggressive. However, my audience in Bandung remained seated and kept on talking. When I completed Shanti's presentation, they literally assaulted me by asking me for an autograph. In India, my experience was rather funny. At the time, I had been solicited to give a conference. No one had heard of my music. As I finished my speech, which lasted about two hours, I asked the listeners if they had questions. Suddenly, someone asked me: "Could you whistle your music a bit?" In France, I have often lived strange experiences. Although contemporary music is well developed in Europe, there are still musicians in some orchestras who do not like contemporary music. However, they play in excellent symphony orchestras. Those orchestras will only play works by Beethoven, Brahms or the like. Once I had a peculiar experience in Paris. I had just attended the first presentation of my new piece "Fluctuante-Immuable" for a big orchestra. The Orchestre de Paris was playing as the premiere had been commissioned by the French government. In the middle of the presentation, the musicians of the orchestra suddenly stopped playing and refused to go on. They were protesting. But that time, the audience was on my side and the performance resumed. No concentration J: What was your personal impression as you heard Shanti? S (Sardono): Before the beginning, you asked me to concentrate and listen to your music. J: Indeed. S: I think you made a mistake. When I tried to concentrate, I was no longer able to listen to your music carefully. I almost fell asleep many times. As I did not manage to focus on the sound of your music, I opened up instead to relax and let those sounds enter my soul. Then I felt really good, and I enjoyed Shanti. To me, the problem is that if you concentrate on the sounds that come from your music, then you come out of yourself and you objectivize the sounds. Thus, the opposition between object and subject becomes clear. As for me, meeting a music that gives me the impression of being a violent giant prints in my conscience that the listening process actually goes through my ears. In that case, my ears are the first openings if we are linked to outside noises. We must be silent within and let the sounds penetrate us. If we remain silent within, only the sounds that we let enter inside us and that we naturally need penetrate us. That is important to face this sound… it is so gigantic. If you do not follow this approach, you will be drawn into a muddled maze of sounds because you actually do not need all the sounds you hear. Or they all become a sort of pollution. It is important for me to tell you that because to me, the existence of an art form created by artists like you bears a positive significance, which means that it makes sure that human conscience is always awake, and that it will not give up, it will not accept the pollution of sounds surrounding us, partially because of our advanced technology. In the best of cases, you can raise your conscience so that it wonders whether it is legitimate for human instincts to be buried underneath piles of ugly sounds for no reason. For instance, machine sounds in a factory right behind your house, the tampered exhaust systems of mopeds, all kinds of car horns, etc. J: Your comments are quite interesting. I probably made a mistake when I used the word "concentration", but I did not want to say "not to listen" through the meaning of "concentration"… I cannot find the exact word. Not just aesthetic F: I understand why you asked us to concentrate before the beginning. It may be the result of an obsession following what happened in Bandung? J: Yes! What about your personal impression? F: I ran up against a problematic, different from Sardono's. I experienced something extraordinary when I had a real dialog with Shanti. It is just something that triggers a huge sensual power, that is what I often feel – for instance, when I listen to "Verklarte Nacht" and "String Quartet" by Schoenberg, "Petrouchka" by Stravinsky, "La Mer" by Debussy, "Stimmung" by Stockhausen, even "Sextuor Mystic" by Villa Lobos. However, when I listen to their music, my experience is limited by the senses and impressions. When I listened to Shanti, I felt an experience that is not only aesthetic, but a real experience, not one going beyond the limits of an activity that is simply psychological but also physical. That means that, at that very moment, I really live a full experience, during which I reached the limits of identification between my own being and the sound. That is probably what Abraham Maslov called the "apex experience". Such an experience is truly a unique experience for me, and so far I have only felt it a few times. Nevertheless, beyond that problem, Shanti, as a composition, presents a weakness, which, I have to admit, disturbed my "dialog". At that moment, I was not yet aware of the nature of that weakness, but I am sure there is a sort of hole in Shanti. The fact is that right at the end of the show, I suddenly felt that it was very short. And I would like to see a sequel. J: You mean that you listened very seriously and you would like to live again the second apotheosis that you would like to reach. F: You no longer stimulate the creation of suggestive sounds especially during that process. Listening to the first part of Shanti, which is so exuberant, I can prepare myself again to penetrate into that atmosphere of apotheosis, but at that very moment, right after that, it is the end! While my emotional abilities started to free themselves, they are destroyed. I think that is why my friend and I felt the need for a continuation. If it is the effect that you tried to produce, I can tell you that you were perfectly successful, but if that is not the case, then it really is the weakness of the show. Three days later, Eloy left Indonesia by sincerely thanking the musicians who had helped him set up the Shanti show, which almost did not see the light of day. FRANKI RADEN	DOWNLOAD