Jean-Claude Eloy - French Vomposer - June 15, 1938 - November 19, 2025

Jean-Claude Eloy was a French composer of instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music.

In his work, Eloy realizes one of the most significant syntheses of 20th-century music—between electronic and instrumental music, between European and non-European music.[2] Although he received a solid classical music education, Eloy has been an admirer and connoisseur of non-European musical traditions since his youth. While he never rejected the complexities of Western musical thought, his experience with non-European music decisively shapes his artistic inspiration.

Musical Education

Jean-Claude Eloy was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan (near Rouen). After classical studies at the Paris Conservatoire (piano, chamber music, counterpoint, Ondes Martenot, and composition with Darius Milhaud), Eloy attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music several times between the late 1950s and early 1960s. From 1961 to 1963, Eloy studied composition with Pierre Boulez at the Basel Music Academy.

From 1966 to 1968, Eloy was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. After his time abroad in the USA, Eloy distanced himself from serial music, and his work increasingly focused on sound itself and its ritual dimension.[6] From the beginning of the 1970s, his work incorporated more explicit and frequent cultural references to philosophical and musical ideas from Asian traditions (especially India and Japan).
The work Kâmakalâ ("Triangle of Energies") for three orchestras, five choral groups, and three conductors represented a true stylistic turning point in his oeuvre.

In 1972, Eloy was invited by his friend Karlheinz Stockhausen to the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne to realize his first electronic work. The result of his studio experiments with sound and the time of sound was Shânti ("Peace") (1972/73), a two-hour fresco for electronic and concrete sounds, influenced in particular by the philosophy of Heraclitus (the struggle of opposites) and by the writings of the yogi Sri Aurobindo Ghoses.

Following the composition of Fluctuante-Immuable (1977) for orchestra, Eloy worked between 1977 and 1978 at the Studio for Electronic Music of Tokyo Radio (NHK), where he composed the four-hour fresco Gaku-no-Michi ("The Ways of Music" or "The Dao of Music"), based on the dialectic between concrete (sounds recorded from everyday Japanese life) and abstract materials (purely synthetically generated sounds).

Jean-Claude Eloy ‎– Yo-In / complete ( 4 × CD) / 2011

Jean-Claude Eloy - Âhata-Anâhata (Anâhata I Partie 2) [1986]

Jean-Claude Eloy -- Shanti / "Prémonitions" (1973)