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

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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

 

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