Biography

Jean-Claude Éloy (born 15 June 1938) is a French composer of instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. Jean-Claude Éloy was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan near Rouen. He studied composition with Darius Milhaud at the Paris Conservatory, where he was awarded four premier prix: in piano (1957), in chamber music (1958), in counterpoint (1959), and in ondes Martenot (1960). During this same period he attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1957, 1960, and 1961, where he studied with Henri Pousseur, Hermann Scherchen, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1961, he also studied with Boulez at the City of Basel Music Academy.In 1966, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until 1968. At Stockhausen's invitation, he spent 1972–73 working at the Studio for Electronic Music (WDR) in Cologne, where he produced Shânti (revised in 1974), for electronic and concrete sounds, in which he explored timbre and aspects of musical time. In 1977, Éloy spent long periods of time in Japan, realizing one of the high-points in his electronic-music output, the nearly four-hour-long Gaku-no-Michi (The Dào [Paths] of Music), at the Electronic Music Studio of NHK in Tokyo, and from 1978 he worked at the Centre d'Études de Mathématiques et Automatique Musicales, founded by Iannis Xenakis.

In the late 1980s, Éloy embarked on a cycle of compositions collectively titled Libérations, focussing on women or the feminine principle, and developed in collaboration with exceptional vocalists such as Junko Ueda, Fátima Miranda, and Yumi Nara. Each work is devoted to one or another feminine figure from mythology, literature, or cultural history, and features female solo voices with instruments and/or electro-acoustics. The first two works of the cycle, Sappho Hikètis (The Imploring Sappho) and Butsumyôe (Ceremony of Repentance) were composed in 1989. These were followed in 1990–91 by Erkos (Hymn of Praise), then by Gaia Songs (1991–92), and finally Galaxies (Sigma version 1996). In 2011, the composer decided to retitle the cycle Chants pour l'autre moitié du ciel [Songs for the Other Half of the Sky], subtitled Songs of Loneliness, of Supplication, of Revolt, of Celebrations, or of Prayers.Éloy founded his own publishing house and record company, hors territoires, with the aim of documenting his artistic work through the publication of books and compact discs.