Jean-Claude Eloy was a French composer (15 June 1938 - 19 November 2025) of instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborated with studios of electronic music in Cologne and in Tokyo. Inspired beyond Western classical music traditions by Hindu and Japanese philosophy and music, he composed long ritual pieces. He studied at the Paris National Superior Conservatory of Music, where he won First Prizes in Piano, Chamber Music, Counterpoint, Ondes Martenot, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud. He attended summer courses at Darmstadt (Pousseur, Scherchen, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen) and was a student in composition in Pierre Boulez? master class at the Music Academy in Basel (1961-1963), where he received also the teaching of Stockhausen. Published by Heugel, Amphion, Universdal Edition (Vienna), he created ?hors territoires? in 2004 in order to help the publication of his texts, books, recordings, and scores.
? ... A solitary composer who has managed one of the most significant syntheses of 20th century music (between electronic and acoustic music, but also between Western and non-European traditions), Eloy tackles and convincingly solves an essential problem of our time : the relationship to the other, to the stranger, to what is different, not so much as an object of curiosity, admiration or submission, but as a vitalizing source of creative inspiration?. --The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 1998, Dr. Ivanka Stoïanova, Professor at the University of Paris VIII
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2CD
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HT 028-29CD
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$20.00
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RELEASE DATE: 5/22/2026
A l'approche du feu meditant ("Approaching the meditative flame"), originally composed in 1983. Theater Music for a sound and visual ceremonial. A tribute to the goddess of the light, the sun, and the stars. For 27 instrumentalists from the Gagaku Orchestra (divided in three separate ensembles), two choruses of Buddhist monk singers (Shômyo singing traditionnal school -- Tendai and Shingon sects -- divided in four separated ensembles, with four monk singer soloist voices), six percussionists, five Bugaku dancers. Extracts of this piece were published by Harmonia Mundi on a double vinyl in 1985.
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CD
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HT 030CD
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$14.50
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RELEASE DATE: 5/22/2026
A series of instrumental pieces documenting the years before the switch to the long electroacoustic compositions more characteristic of the composer. Faisceaux-Diffractions (1970) for 28 instrumentalists including a Hammond organ, and two electric guitars. Recording of the world premiere, on October 30, 1970, in Washington D.C. (USA) by the New York Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. "The instrumental ensemble is subdivided into three strongly isomorphic orchestras, allowing the treatment in the space of similar musical structures. This tone-color isomorphism allows sometimes to leave 'floating' the synchronization between the three orchestras, the conductor being able to combine the 'tiling' of the orchestras, following a large number of possibilities, but within strictly defined temporal proportions.". Macles (1966) extracts of the music of the film La Religieuse (The Nun) by Jacques Rivette. For various groups of instruments including a solo Zarb and a Cymbalum. Ensemble Musique Vivante under the conducting of Boris de Vinogradov. Zarb solo played by Jean-Pierre Drouet. "At the time of the realization of this work, in 1966, I was a teacher at the University of Berkeley, and I was trying to find a theory to unify the modal music (repetitive, with uses of fixed harmonic fields and use of notes poles, etc.) to atonal chromatic music, serial or not (variational, fluctuating, ornamented, etc.): this by directly organizing the structural blocks, and not by deducing them from a serie." Boucle et Sequence (1968) for 19 instrumentalists. Very short musical sequences for the film l'Amour fou (Mad love) by Jacques Rivette. "These two very short musics were written in 1968 at the request of Jacques Rivette for his film l'Amour Fou (Mad love), which he was shooting (Sequence is the music of the very last scene of the film -- in its original version -- when Jean-Pierre Kalfon leaves walking alone in the streets of Paris). In hindsight, they constitute a sort of 'premonition' of the writing and aesthetics, which will then be affirmed, in 1970 and 1971, with Faisceaux-Diffractions and Kâmakalâ (use of repetitive loops; mass heterophony; intervals filled in active aggregates; etc.)"
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2CD
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HT 026-27CD
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$20.00
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RELEASE DATE: 5/22/2026
Gaia-Songs (1992, revision 2015). For a soprano (or mezzo-soprano) solo and an actress voice (Sprechgesang technique) with electro-acoustic (fixed sounds). Anne-Lisa Nathan, mezzo-soprano. Helena Rüegg, actress voice. "First there's this relation between sung voices and spoken voices with regard to the electro-acoustic parts. The sung voice is quite often separated from the electro-acoustical parts accompanying it. They may sometimes overlap each other but rather briefly. Those parts often highlight octave ratios, fifth ratios, third-ratios, etc. Hence more harmonious and consonant acoustic ratios. By contrast the spoken voice fully covers the electro-acoustic parts dedicated to it and made out of more complex material. Hence more dissonant acoustic ratios turned towards noises spectrums." JC-Eloy from the liner notes.
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4CD
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HT 031-34CD
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$32.00
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RELEASE DATE: 5/22/2026
The four pieces that compose Réminiscences, a masterpiece if ever there was one, create the equivalent of a human day, from dawn to night, from call to cry, from meditation to revolt, through the clash of the sounds of human and natural activities. Simply unique and grandiose. Jean-Claude Eloy (1938) is a French composer with a classical background who moved away from the structures and models that had carried him until then (models imposed on contemporary music through various institutional and official hegemonies) to create, from the early 1970s onwards, long electroacoustic frescoes, vast poems of sounds and noises between Western and Eastern traditions, the main aim of which is to liberate the sound imagination. 5-panel digipak. Includes 24-page booklet.
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