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YO-IN
Press (English)
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LE MONDE
Saturday, November 22, 1980
MUSIC
AU SIGMA DE BORDEAUX
(AT THE SIGMA FESTIVAL IN BORDEAUX)
Jean-Claude Eloy's Reverberations
Jacques Lonchampt
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LE MONDE
Wednesday, February 25, 1981
MUSIC
Réverbérations psychiques
(Psychic Reverberations)
Jacques Lonchampt
*
LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR
22 August 1981 #876
MUSIC
by Maurice Fleuret
In the Eye
of the Storm
YO-IN
by Jean-Claude EIoy
Avignon Festival
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KÖLNER STADT-ANZEIGER
Friday, September 18, 1981
A Relaxing Bath into Sounds
Music of Time ("Musik der Zeit") at the WDR:
the Imaginative Opera Yo-In by Jean-Claude Eloy
by Gisela Gronemeyer
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YO-IN
Press (English)
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LE MONDE
Saturday, November 22, 1980
MUSIC
AU SIGMA DE BORDEAUX
(AT THE SIGMA FESTIVAL IN BORDEAUX)
Jean-Claude Eloy's Reverberations
The fifteenth anniversary
of the SIGMA Festival in Bordeaux – how fast time flies! – deserved
a look back to the field of contemporary music for which it has done so
much (70 concerts and 56 world premieres). The streets and the Entrepôt
Laîné's rooms house an exhibition dedicated to "those
musicians and their funny machines", the significant cornerstones
of new instrument making, from the gimmick box to the computer, with the
collaboration of the main French electronic production organizations.
A captivating journey presented with much educational experience.
Next to the IRCAM concerts, to the Itineraire Ensemble, to the International
Saxophone Ensemble, the major events are the presence of the UPIC, the
Xenakis composing machine, on which, like in Lille, students from the
Paris Conservatory, and other students, actors and instrumentalists have
been working, as well as the Wednesday night premiere of a new piece by
Jean-Claude Eloy, Yo-in, falling within the line and level of Shanti and
Gaku-No-Michi, those two great creations of electronic meditation very
much stamped with Eastern mysticism.
With this music on tape now comes a dazzling percussionist: Michael Ranta,
who directly steps in with various instrument groups different for each
part and intertwining with the prerecorded discourse using the same instruments.
There is a "reverberation" (the meaning of Yo-in in Japanese)
updating and dramatizing the work (with impressive lighting), and personifying
it deeper.
Transcendence
This "music for an
imaginary ritual" (which lasts three hours and forty minutes) includes
four parts: "Appel-imploration" (call-imploration), "Unification",
"Méditation-contemplation", "Libération-célébration".
Everything is set in motion through the instrumental resonances that stir
up memory and the inner powers of the soul in order to trigger some kind
of "transcendental experience".
It is impossible to evoke these long periods characterized by a tremendous
still breath where the sound imperceptibly transforms itself in a time
widened to the dimensions of eternity without our attention flagging.
One can hardly indicate the steps.
Low-pitch ship sirens form the mesmerizing frame on which majestic temple
bells to the mysterious unknown essence of the universe will resonate
("Appel-imploration").
At the Heart of Meditation
Then, the percussionist
turns into a blue collar worker; he saws, drills holes and pours steel
debris in sound tanks amidst the music of stylized machines that little
by little come in harmony with the sounds of nature, bird songs, sonorities
from a vibraphone, a marimba, and bells in the wind. The rhythms of man
and nature match and become united instead of fighting against each other.
And then, one penetrates into the heart of the "Meditation"
where various bells wrap a poem spoken in Japanese: "The great peace
is drawing near, time is pausing." However, as in Shanti, world tragedies
violently tear apart this meditation aiming at peace and unity: the long
resonances of an atomic bomb mingle with horrifying drumming, with the
cries of tortured victims (in an actually overly dramatized portrait…),
with the demonstration of stylized protests that gradually bring back
peace and contemplation on large resonances of a low-pitch closed pipe.
As a tribute to the "opposing martyr", candles on the ground
are lit, marking the outline of an Eastern ideogram; a violent wind blows
through the loudspeakers as though to announce the departure of a spaceship,
the soaring of the human being, perhaps towards a transcendence that still
refuses to tell its name.
JACQUES LONCHAMPT
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LE MONDE
Wednesday, February 25, 1981
MUSIC
ELOY, FERRARI, PARMEGIANI
Réverbérations psychiques
(Psychic Reverberations)
A musical event is likely
to go unnoticed in Paris: Yo-In by Jean-Claude Eloy, recently world
premiered at the Sigma Festival in Bordeaux (Le Monde, November 22), is
yet one of the major creations of these past years. However, it is presented
in a new venue, which the public is still not familiar with, the New-York
Hall of the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris, by a "structure"
also new, "Musique en théâtre", which, a month
before, had already welcomed Körpersprache, by Schnebel, but has
not yet built a clientele.There are two days left (1) to hear this "music
for an imaginary ritual" featuring an extraordinary percussionist,
Michael Ranta, in a journey around the world in six places where quite
diverse instrument families "enter in resonance" (Yo-In's meaning)
with a huge electronic epic lasting close to four hours and born of all
the "psychic reverberations" created by those percussions: Eastern
temple bells calling to an unnamed transcendence, the noise of machines
integrating to wood instruments evoking nature, small Chinese bells leading
to contemplation, drumming on skins that all of a sudden awaken the tragedies
of cruelty, torture, human struggles, with a return to the initial call,
which remains unanswered. This impressive piece marks a milestone in Jean-Claude
Eloy's production towards a more scenic expression that should come to
an "Opera" of new conception dreamed of by this very solitary
musician, who certainly is, at the age of 42, a "carrier of the future".
[…]
JACQUES LONCHAMPT
(1) Yo-In will be presented
again on Tuesday February 24 and Wednesday February 25 at 8:30 pm, in
the New-York Hall, entrance: 16, avenue de New-York (metro stop: Alma-Marceau).
Sound Engineering: Guy-Noël Le Corre; Light Engineering: Gérald
Lafosse.
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LE
NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR
22 August 1981 #876
MUSIC
by
Maurice Fleuret
In the Eye of the Storm
Within
four hours, Jean-Claude Eloy reinvented an integral opera of crossing
sounds, a whole new gesture theater
YO-IN
by Jean-Claude EIoy
Avignon Festival
In the middle of the Celestine cloister
two giant plane trees support the night canopy. It looks like an owl has
built its nest on top of the foliage. Its call of distress, and affection
as well, sharpens our attention at regular intervals.
Other birds have now flown to it. Their song is clearer, purer, if at
all possible, resonating like an electronic, treble-modulated white noise.
Has the work started yet, without our noticing it, among the various sounds
coming from the city? Indeed, if you listen carefully, the distant drone
muffled by the dew is more typical of an early-bird tractor in the fields.
As a matter of fact, the owl song gradually turns into a foghorn tune,
then into a ship's siren, and finally into a score of continuous vibrations,
an ever thicker and richer score, soon being as wide as a river with cloudy
harmonic eddies reminiscent of the slow and low-frequency chords of the
prelude to "The Rhine Gold".
Daily Racket
Then at the foot of the trees the spotlight
beams reveal a percussionist in a white tunic, sitting Eastern style in
front of the lined up ritual bells. The musician priest claps his hands
twice as though to call the sound of the instrument, invoke the resonance,
and revive memory. However, the speakers emit the first response before
he finally dares make the metal sing with his own fingers. That initial
action will develop into a long incantation rite, into a quiet asceticism
of stretched resonances, punctuated by the wide-frequency vibration of
the Japanese temple bells coming in various sizes, each set on a precious
pillow, like a sort of chalice containing the mystery of the sound, the
symbol of all other mysteries. The movement will reach its apex under
an enormous moon with the biggest thus lowest-frequency bell whose literally
telluric voice, all the more impressive as it was expected, sounds to
spread waves so dense and powerful that they seem tangible.
The Japanese term "Yo-In" means reverberation. It first refers
to acoustic reverberation, including that of metal percussions and that
which is often created between the direct instrumental sound and the sound
transformed as it is reproduced by the magnetic tape. But it also refers
to mental and psychic reverberation with the stream of memory, that is
the irregular stream creating correspondence or even interference between
past and present. As a result, the audience will be at the center of those
crossing echoes, those reflections, those undertows, those cast shadows,
at the heart of the motionless vortex, in the eye of the storm, at the
very point where the multiplicity of appearances triggers its own explosion
from mere excess of pressure, and finally unveils the absolute reality.
Now the transcendental itinerary of the first act yields to the second
act and its tremendous daily racket in a sheet metal workshop. Wearing
the appropriate uniform, Michael Ranta, the Protee-percussionist, handles
his file and hammer on the sheets, releases the unbearable shrilling sounds
of the rotary saw, and creates a firework shooting up from the electric
grindstone. But those violent sounds, harmonized, even sublimated by the
speakers, spontaneously become musically dignified, just like the hail
and the rising sand soon later born of the grains that slide on the taborin
skin, or yet again the splashing coming from the water basin, the sardonic
cooing of the flexaton, the clinking bamboos of the Javanese anklungs...,
while a thunderstorm is breaking in at distant points of the magnetic
tape, and a rain shower is falling fast on an imaginary marsh.
The third act brings us back to the mind, to a state of concentration,
or to be more accurate, to a state of contemplation under the tinkling
of Chinese bells, cymbals and crotals, genuine celestial and abstract
chimes of achievement. However, the fourth and last act opens on a terrible
scene of torture, characterized by several quickened strings of brutally
struck blows on the skin of a low-frequency drum. Then resonate the cries
and complaints of the victims, and the insults they hurl at their torturer:
"I hate you, I abhor you, bastard, die, die!" on a backdrop
of vitriolic creaking sounds coming from a gong streaked with deep scratch
marks.
The moment comes when a wave unrolling from very far away, a swell of
sounds, a continuous flow slowly getting nearer and growing, carrying
every human laughter and bellowing roar, every machine sound, every sigh
of nature, every previous or future vibration, until their complete dissolution.
It is similar to the general sound of the whole creation process. However,
this sound is alive in all its thickness and powerfully organic in its
profusion. Strange spirals stir its liquid matter, that original magma,
that plasma where death and life merge, and, as a result, take us back
to the beginning of the ritual, rigidly waiting for the "Rhine Gold",
followed by the calling gesture of the celebrant.
Spellbinding Magic
The performance has come full circle. The
work is accomplished, the word has been spoken. I look at my watch for
the first time: it has been four hours since I entered the sanctuary and
I have not left my seat. Actually, nowadays few musical pieces are able
to keep the audience awake that long. "Yo-In" does not just
capture it through a mere act of hypnosis, through the spellbinding magic
of the sounds, through some hovering dizziness as one has experienced
many times since the advent of repetitive music. "Yo-In" is
not born of a land of oblivion but of the domain of conscience.
Here, once time has been stretched by the long evolving scores, one becomes
much more accessible and open, extremely receptive to the many specific
and complex events that follow one another, overlap, intermingle and combine
with one another in a wonderfully mastered development. The limited use
of that never-ending discourse impacts the appropriate duration that suits
each element depending on its function, takes care of the transitions,
spares the rests, excites the spirit, and finally reaches the deep natural
breathing that sets a brilliantly accomplished large form apart from the
rest.
"Yo-In" is also an opera of sounds,
a gesture theater play. The constant relation that the percussionist maintains
with the several hundred European and Asian instruments obviously originates
in the dramatic action. The dialectic that gradually develops between
the real acoustics and the artificial electro-acoustics is no less marked
with theatricals. In both cases, the situation is not new but simply pushed
further than ever before with unprecedented flexibility, balance and efficiency.
That is the reason why nobody really suffered from the absence of the
planned stage setting: Patrick Fleury was not able to adapt his movable
boards, his dollies, his screens and his spotlights to the stone setting
of the Celestine cloister. However, in the future, it would be better
not to give up so easily as it is evident that, as it appears today, that
creation opens the way to an infinite number of visual, scenic, graphic
interpretations and more, for the only fact that its musical substance
is consistent enough in terms of abundance to tolerate any whim of the
imagination.
The privilege of masterpieces
Lastly, I wish to remind who did not have
a chance to see and hear "Yo-In" during its creation at the
Sigma Festival in Bordeaux last November, when it was presented again
in Paris, or recently during the Avignon Festival, that this piece of
work is a major step in Jean-Claude Eloy's career as well as perhaps in
the history of Western music produced in the past few years.
"Faisceaux-Diffractions" in 1970 and, most of all, "Kâmakalâ"
in 1971, had sealed the belated union between Boulez' former student and
the Eastern model, strangely discovered on the US West Coast and applied
later in India and the Far-East. The Stockhausen example and the control
over electronic means led to the birth of a magnetic-tape-based meditative
piece of work with enormous proportions, "Shânti", in
1974. However, one was expecting to see the result of the work that Jean-Claude
Eloy had carried on since 1978 with the computer music team headed by
lannis Xénakis (1).Who could have guessed that "Yo-In",
bypassing and moving beyond those trends, those influences and those directions,
was going to synthesize the various experiences of its composer through
his most original invention alone? At 43, Jean-Claude Eloy offers a full
creation, where every detail counts but where the whole sum naturally
attains the universal dimension. Somehow it is his own Sistine Chapel
ceiling or his Ninth Symphony.
Finally, "Yo-In" is the first creation, as far as I know, that
explains and justifies in itself with no verbiage the endemic return to
tonality, a phenomenon that has been observed for at least five years
among active composers. It achieves this through the mere illustration
of its subject: the reverberation, the resonance, the harmonics that follow,
and the whole process that, from Guy d'Arezzo to Ernest Ansermet, served
as a demonstration to whomever wished to prove the validity of the tonal
system. However, Jean-Claude Eloy's work is not really tonal. It does
not shy away from being so or seeming to be so here and there nor does
it refuse to be entirely different elsewhere. It is the privilege of masterpieces
to offer every observer a different outlook and still totally real.
MAURICE FLEURET
(1) Cemamu (Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique
et d'Automatique Musicales; Center for research on Mathematical and Automated
Music)
This text appears in the book:
Maurice Fleuret ; chroniques pour la musique d'aujourd'hui
published by Bernard Coutaz (1992)
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KÖLNER STADT-ANZEIGER
Friday, September 18, 1981
A Relaxing Bath into Sounds
Music of Time ("Musik der Zeit") at the WDR:
the Imaginative Opera Yo-In by Jean-Claude Eloy
by Gisela Gronemeyer
The representation of Yo-In, the imaginative
opera by Jean-Claude Eloy, lasted close to four hours at the Music Conservatory
of Cologne (Kölner Musikhochschule). A solitary Michael Ranta appeared
on stage among a full arsenal of "Asian percussions" engaging
in percussion rituals over sounds recorded on magnetic tape. Music of
Time ("Muzik der Zeit") at the WDR.
The thought of listening to new music for four hours can be scary; the
reality actually proved very enjoyable. The work is far from having met
with sheer success in Cologne as it did in France where it premiered last
fall, but what happened there is, all in all, not that important.
The French composer, who clearly belongs to Stockhausen's lineage, presents
the human cosmos, its nature and its reign, in four acts that he characterized
as rituals of supplication, unification, meditation and liberation. These
processes are executed in a very concrete way from a sound point of view:
the great supplication chant comes from the unique sound of a ship's siren;
during the unification one witnesses the merging of machinery sounds and
electronic and natural sounds as the percussionist uses a soldering torch.
The meditation phase is essentially marked with the sound of the gong
and the bells, and the liberation process unfolds with screams of torture.
Eloy has concrete material, including many percussion sounds recorded
on magnetic tape and electronically processed. The soloist merges into
the loudspeaker music; he enlivens and dramatizes it. It is also the Japanese
meaning of the word "Yo-In", which refers to "echo, sound,
harmony".
The composition produced on magnetic tape is quite refined; the listener
is really immersed in the sounds, and the whole arrangement of the work
is tied to the quality and preferences of percussionist Michael Ranta,
as though it were branded. The performance yields a relaxing and refreshing
effect, and the listener leaves the hall in a serene state.
GISELA GRONEMEYER
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