Article paru dans “Créateurs du XX ème siècle” en mai 1992
Le catalogue de Christian ELOY indique clairement sa double activité de compositeur de musique instrumentale et de musique électroacoustique. Son cheminement musical, très classique dans un premier temps, a été nettement infléchi par la découverte puis la pratique de la musique électroacoustique ; c’est grâce à Ivo Malec qu’il revient un peu plus tard à l’écriture instrumentale et vocale, fort de la démarche d’une écoute réactivée par l’expérience acquise au Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Christian ELOY revendique volontiers ses références de Varèse à Malec en passant par Bério, Ligetti, Grisey. Son esthétique intègre les apports de la musique concrète et électronique, mais aussi les influences de l’école spectrale. Une constante se retrouve dans les commentaires ou critiques de ses pièces instrumentales et électroacoustiques, on parle à son propos de musique généreuse et ” habitée “. Ce qui ne manque pas d’originalité en ces temps d’intellectualisme gratuit et de manque d’émotion musicale. Un prix européen en 85 viendra confirmer ces qualités. On ne peut dissocier de son travail le constant besoin de communiquer et transmettre son art, par l’enseignement ou par des actions pédagogiques de création ; il se qualifie lui-même de “militant” de la bonne cause “musique contemporaine ». Christian ELOY ne fait pas partie de ces chapelles ou cénacles bien connus, même s’il fréquente régulièrement ces hauts lieux de la création contemporaine, son parcours et ses productions sont suffisamment atypiques pour n’être pas estampillés. Son catalogue témoigne de ce souci de démystification de la musique de notre temps, puisqu’on y trouve des pièces pédagogiques instrumentales mais aussi des œuvres pédagogiques électroacoustiques, contes pour enfants etc.… chose assez rare dans le genre qui mérite d’être mentionnée. Des œuvres plus importantes telles son quintette “La dentelle du signe” ou cette pièce pour grand ensemble “Dissidence” ou encore ces œuvres électroacoustiques “Eléments mécaniques” ou “Carpe Diem” sont maintenant connues et régulièrement jouées en Europe et diffusées sur les ondes. Christophe Aribaut, critique musical – extrait de ” Créateurs du XXème siècle “
Revue et critique de SONOLOCO – http://www.sonoloco.com/rev/grm/grmframes.html
Christian Eloy (1945) “musica mundana” (2000) , “l’estran” (1995).
INA e 5010. Duration: 32:00.
Christian Eloy is a teacher at the Bordeaux Conservatoire and at the Paris Adac-GRM workshops.
Early encounters with electroacousticians like Ivo Malec, Guy Reibel, Jacques Lejeune and Jean Schwarz directed his creative efforts into the realms of electroacoustics.
It may be noted that those influences all stem from the more rough, eerie and wild spirits of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, each one of those composers supplying a lot of venomous creativity into the art of sound making, kicking it far and wide into the kingdom of enchantedness, extending the art into uncharted topographies of auditory expanses.
Sure enough, this sharpness of expression &endash; this tour-de-force attitude &endash; is evident in Eloy’s beginner piece on this compact compact from Groupe de Recherches Musicales; “musica mundana” (2000). He gets off on a brute note, shoving a Parmegiani Création-du-Monde rhythm in front of his auditory machinery, in a mix-down of several caches of sounds; probably both computer generated and concrete. A chatter as from a divine species of apes gushes forth like a forced massage of your tympanic membranes, on a backdrop of metallic drones, but breathing of undetermined beings continue, and voices as out of “2001, A Space Odyssey” emerge, subsequently losing their grip in beautiful, dreamy bell sounds… Bee swarm music move in front of high pitch events of stretched durations, rendering the music an even more space-like, austere, hinterland atmosphere of distant worlds of which we can know nothing, of which we can only dream, and since there is no such thing as simultaneousness in the universe, we can never really communicate on the same level with distant worlds &endash; unless we find a new way of communicating (which may be here and at work, though we don’t yet know it, or have forgotten it in this secular, overly materialistic world in which our spirits reside for a while). Yes, maybe some of these feelings that are illustrated in Eloy’s piece by iron work shrills or Tibetan monks chanting and Challenger engines gearing up actually do reach us through telepathy, through a communion of spirits over vast and unfathomable distances, and maybe it’s just our way of thinking that is wrong, since we’re so caught up in our limited concepts of matter, space and time &endash; and especially death and life… Could it be that we’re indestructible spirits traveling from life to life in an endless series of experiences, and that distance and time just constitute some characteristics of existence, nothing more… Well, in any case, electroacoustic music &endash; and certainly this piece by Christian Eloy &endash; evokes notions like that, evokes strands of thought like that; daring thoughts, free thoughts of free minds, soaring through the impulses of this grand music, which vibrates through the ether.
The vocals are inspiring, sometimes raw, then again manipulated, permutated and ground beyond recognition, but at times emerging out of the spheres like angelic prayers in a state of desperate bliss…
The female voice that comes on now and then belongs to Irène Jarsky.
Explosive, bubbling, foamy sounds thud back and forth like a small revolution in a postage package or the panic of the sinking Kursk, and my hair itches in beat with the high pitched incisions, until citric drops fall in percussive showers into a tin bucket, opening the audio to froggish expressions out of the amassed computers of binary underworlds… Allah o Akbar!
A “Ligeti-organ” sweeps past, introducing some panning percussive permutables, which turn into rhythms reminiscent of the sounds of village women in Niger beating millet.
High pitches saw through you skull in lethal timbres, as the end approaches in faint murmurs of infrasound.
The second and last piece on this compact compact from the fantasies of Christian Eloy is “l’estran” (1995).
The booklet text reads: “What a beautiful metaphor is this piece of coastline included between the highest and lowest sea-waters. It conveys an impression of in-between, uncertainty, contraries, flesh of fish, earth or sea, who knows?”.
A poem by Jean Michel is included in the textual presentation:
Modesty about what is hidden, then nakedness, the fleshy color of wet sand Motionless motion Strange estran, self-destructive Tragic estran Hopeful, hopeless Here, time even is some kind of renunciation Thou fathomth the worthlessness of unconscious comings and goings In these uncertain places for no real cause
An inconspicuous beginning in the mode of a string piece by Giacinto Scelsi expands in intensity and loudness, into a bubbling forth of alien-world sounds of hidden places behind the horizon of the known universe. Suddenly very well-known events arrive in the shape of the creaking and squeaking of fenders and ropes from boats in the harbor heaving in the swell from old storms, having died down below the horizon. Even these sounds take on a dreamy, spooky aura, as they’re manipulated by Eloy, echoed and panned, swept out of context and finally out of wack, landing in Stockhausenesque short-wave blurt-outs and the feel of cardamom being severely ground in Jordanian mortars in the tents of bedouins under cold desert night skies.
All these sounds merge into a wall of sound, eventually giving sudden birth to a giant tractor bursting on the auditory desert stage of Christian Eloy, relentless in might and horror &endash; or is it a time machine, grinding the desert mountains to sand in the passing of eons… Some seemingly analog sounds out of 1950s and 1960s electronic music machinery bring back a sturdy, screeching moment of WDR reminiscences, and we are elated by this reveling in hard core electroacoustics.
Some incredibly rocky events come charging towards the end of the piece, in a lithophonic gesture of granite might! It feels like Stockhausen’s Sirius space ships gearing up and taking off, and you’re left on the surface of this Earth with faces turned up towards the mysteries of endless space…
Christian Eloy’s CD has given me an exciting ride through my fantasies, and I encourage anyone with a broad mind and a knack for pure identification to give these works a spin through the laser box.
